1

I arrived late for the screening at Warner Bros. The man who had invited me let me know how late by pointedly ignoring my entrance. He was seated alone in the last row of the little theater. The rest of the audience was grouped together up front. All six of them, by my hurried count. They also ignored me as I took my seat beside the gentleman in the back.

In place of hello, the man asked, “Do you remember where you were when you first saw Passage to Lisbon?”

The house lights dimmed before I could answer. I passed the few seconds of quiet darkness that followed thinking of that lost evening at the movies. The moment held a prominent place in my collection of wartime memories, not far behind the Sunday morning in Hollywood, California, when I heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the afternoon in Rheims, France, when word came in that Germany had surrendered. The Passage to Lisbon showing fell between those two milestones, both chronologically and emotionally. The film’s message was tailored for that gray, uncertain, middle period. It said, in essence, “We’re up against it, but we’ve got the stuff to see it through.”

I’d needed to hear the last part of that pep talk very badly when Passage to Lisbon and I, Hollywood’s greatest contribution to the war effort and its most negligible one, came together. Our meeting occurred in June 1943 at the East Garrison of Camp Forrest, Tennessee, in a mess tent converted to a theater on a hot, humid Saturday night.

The smells of dinner hung on in the tent, mingling with the smells of the diners, a hundred or so of us squeezed together on backless wooden benches. The night sounds coming in through the tent’s open flaps—frogs and crickets and God knows what else—almost drowned out the actors. The projector broke down in the middle of every reel. All in all, not the ideal way to see a movie, but I’d never enjoyed one more.

You remember the story. An old liner turned gambling ship with the ironic name Joyeuse Ile is plying the waters of the western Mediterranean in late 1941, a dangerous time for sea travel. France has fallen to the Nazis. The ship is under the protection of Vichy, and commanded by a cynical and hard drinking captain, Roland Manet. The Joyeuse Ile cruises between Marseille and the ports of North Africa, tolerated by British warships for the sake of the refugees it carries and protected from German U-boats by the valuable contraband it smuggles to German forces via friendly Vichy officials. Both sides share another interest in the old liner: it is a meeting ground for spies of all nations, an open market for secret information.

For the lucky refugees, the ones whose papers are in order, the ship is a relatively safe way of escaping Europe. For the unlucky majority, a passage on the Joyeuse Ile represents one last gamble. More than information can be bought on board. The black market also does a brisk business in passports, visas, and identification papers. Despairing refugees gamble in the ship’s casino—run by a mysterious American expatriate named Steven Laird—hoping to win enough to buy their way to freedom.

All that background was passed along in a couple of quick scenes that were over almost before I’d grown numb to my wooden seat. The story really started with the Joyeuse Ile making ready to leave Marseille. Two rumors have electrified the ship’s company. The first is that the liner will make an unprecedented stop in the neutral port of Lisbon. The stated reason is the delivery of a German diplomatic delegation led by a professor named Benz. He and his companions are correctly assumed to be Nazi spies by everyone from Captain Manet to the cabin boys. The second rumor is that someone aboard the ship has obtained two Geneva Exemptions, diplomatic passports issued under the authority of the Geneva convention. Designed to facilitate the movements of convention inspectors and diplomats, the Exemptions are the bureaucratic equivalent of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Anyone possessing them can tap their heels together and escape the Joyeuse Ile forever.

Because of its tantalizing destination, the ship is well stocked with refugees. Among them is Franz Wojcik, a one-time concert pianist turned Polish resistance leader who has been fleeing the Nazis since his escape from a concentration camp. He is traveling with his beautiful cousin Maura.

Wojcik and his cousin make the acquaintance of Steven Laird. Wojcik is desperate to obtain the Geneva Exemptions, which have come into Laird’s possession as security for a gambling debt. The unlucky gambler, a black marketeer named Tursi, is lost overboard under mysterious circumstances prior to the ship’s stop in Oran. Laird and Maura fall in love at first sight. For them, the voyage becomes a cruise out of time, an interlude in which the horror of the war is replaced by moonlit strolls on the deck, cocktails in the ship’s lounge, and endless dances to an old Tin Pan Alley gem, “Love Me Again.”

The action heats up as the Joyeuse Ile nears its final port of call, Lisbon. Laird discovers that Maura is really Wojcik’s wife. He decides that their brief affair has been nothing more than an attempt to obtain the Geneva Exemptions. Maura will say only that she loves Laird. In anger, he pretends to burn one of the passports and offers the other to Wojcik. The patriot can save himself and leave Maura with Laird or send Maura to safety and face certain arrest when the ship returns to Marseille. Either way, Laird will be rid of him. Wojcik surprises him by choosing Maura’s safety over his own.

To redeem himself, Laird gives both the Exemptions to Wojcik and sees the couple off the ship and onto the pilot boat at the mouth of Lisbon harbor. Then, to prevent Benz from interfering with the Wojciks ashore, Steve frees members of the crew imprisoned at the insistence of Benz because of Free French sympathies. He leads the men in an attempt to take the ship, intending to sail it to England. Benz is killed in the fighting, but the mutiny fails. All seems lost until Captain Manet, sickened by the sight of Frenchmen killing Frenchmen, decides to take the ship and its refugee passengers to England himself and join the fight against the Nazis. Fade out as the Joyeuse Ile slips into the fog.

Not Ibsen on a good day, but the movie had struck me as something special at that first showing. Art maybe, or, if not, something as close to it as the Hollywood movie factory could turn out. A lie told by liars so accomplished that it constituted a high order of truth. Between the shots of toy ships that opened and closed the picture, there was a stretch of pure Hollywood, a place I’d longed after in that Tennessee camp the way a blinded man longs for a sunrise. Hidden in the picture’s patriotic public message, there seemed to be a love note direct from Hollywood to me. “I’m behind you,” it said. “I’ll be waiting.” More lies, as it turned out.

A projector came to life through a peephole just above my head, dragging me back to the present, to August 1947. I settled in to watch a scene from the sequel to Passage to Lisbon. It had a hopeful title, borrowed from the original’s theme song: Love Me Again.

The air in the screening room was heavy with smoke, making the projector’s beam appear as a solid shaft above me. The beam lit a small screen painfully until the film began, a dark long shot of a stretch of black sea littered with floating wreckage and obscured now and then by drifting smoke. The movie smoke blended seamlessly with the smoke floating over my head, drawing me into the scene against my will. In place of cigarettes and cigars, I began to smell spent explosive, a smell that was also a sensation, a stinging, a burning. This trick of memory had my palms moistening the plush arms of my chair.

In the background of the shot was a burning bit of wreckage that moved up and down slowly on the oily swell. I tried to distract myself with thoughts of the technicians who had set the prop afloat in the studio tank after rigging it to burn gently, like a fire in a grate. During the shooting, there would have been a man with a fire extinguisher just out of the range of the camera. I tried to move my eyes from the screen to the point in the darkness where he would have stood, but I found I couldn’t manage it.

In the foreground of the shot was a wooden raft and on it were two men. Two sailors, I mean, wearing the gray, tattered uniforms of war. Any war. One man was lying on his back, his right hand pressed against a wet, black wound in his chest. The second figure supported the first. His head was bent toward the wounded sailor and his face was obscured by some craftsman’s careful placement of the lights.

I knew the name of the gentleman playing the wounded man. It was Nigel Clay, one of the top character actors in Hollywood. He was too old in 1947 to be passing himself off as a combatant, but the makeup men had done their best for him. They’d darkened his gray hair and—to balance things—they’d lightened his face, which both simulated a loss of blood and disguised the furrows on his brow and the bags under his eyes. The disguise was far from perfect, but that didn’t matter. Dying men tend to have old men’s faces, so Clay was exactly right for his part.

As the camera moved slowly in on the pair, the face of the second actor was revealed. It was Torrance Beaumont, a one-time crooner turned movie gangster turned romantic star. His short, dishevelled hair was black, as were his eyes and the shadows in his sunken cheeks. The effect should have been sepulchral, but somehow wasn’t. Beaumont looked as fully alive as Clay looked nearly dead.

The scene was a rough cut, an intermediate step between raw rushes and a finished film. The long opening shot was designed to play out against the closing bars of the film’s title music, music that was still unwritten. The shot ended with a close-up of Clay’s ravaged face. When the camera got as close as it was going to get, the actor smiled, weakly.

“It’s all up for me, Steven,” Clay said in the sweet, husky voice that was his meal ticket. “I wonder if that mine was one of theirs or ours. Theirs, I hope.”

“They haven’t made the one yet that’s gonna get you, Captain,” Beaumont’s off-camera voice said.

Clay barely moved his head, but his rejection of the lie came off the screen like a shout.

The next shot showed both actors, Clay in right profile and Beaumont full face. They’d adjusted the lighting for this setup. You could clearly see Beaumont’s eyes now and his slightly twisted mouth.

“Not much time,” Clay said. “I must tell you. Something about the old days.”

“Save your strength, Rollie.”

Clay’s close-up came back on the screen. There was a trickle of blood at the left side of his mouth. It was black, of course, but that limitation of the film stock was accidentally right.

“It’s about Franz Wojcik … and Maura … and Professor Benz … and the Geneva Exemptions.” Clay narrowed his eyes slightly, as though he were straining to remember some lost moment from his childhood. “It’s about our voyage to Lisbon.”

Back then to the two shot as Beaumont spoke. “What about it?”

Clay’s gravelly voice grew more honeyed as his eyes began to lose focus. I found I was leaning forward in my seat.

“It was all an act, Steven. A melodrama worked out by Professor Benz.”

“Then he gave himself a bad part. He left the stage feet first, remember?” Beaumont was keeping pace with Clay now, affecting a light delivery but undercutting it with a dead look in his eyes. Was he worried about Clay or frightened by what the dying man was trying to say? I couldn’t tell.

Clay laughed at Beaumont’s joke. It was the kind of laugh that ends in a cough, a Hollywood convention that tells the audience the lights are about to dim.

“Benz did overplay a little,” Clay said. “He hated you, Steven. He wanted to kill you, even though he needed you to complete his mission.”

“What mission?” Beaumont demanded, a little panicked now, his hand gathering up the bloody front of Clay’s uniform.

“Forgive me, Steven. I was blind then or I would never have been a party to it. Forgive me for that and for this, for taking away the great moment of your life. I thought there still might be …”

Cut to a close-up of Beaumont as Clay’s out-of-focus head slowly tilted away in the foreground. Beaumont’s eyes remained dead, but his mouth bent down in a familiar sneer as he asked the dead man, “What might there be?”

 

2

When the indirect lighting came on in the screening room, the half dozen men in the rows before me got to their feet amid the happy sounds of self-congratulation. I stayed in my seat in the last row, as did Paddy Maguire. Together we watched the audience make their way out. They shook each other’s hands and patted each other’s backs and generally treated Paddy and me like two extra items of furniture.

After the little theater’s upholstered door had swung shut, Paddy spoke without turning toward me. His big voice filled the room, bouncing back at me from the blank white screen. “The money men seemed pleased, Scotty. What did you think of Love Me Again?”

“It was a little short,” I said.

Paddy chuckled. “They’ll fix that soon enough. They just rushed this bit together to scare up some more backers.”

He stood up to stretch and then parked himself against the next row of seats so he could face me. He was just under six feet tall, but big for his height, his waistline running a close second to his barrel chest. His face was broad, with features that were regular but generously doled out, and his jaw was heavy enough to gracefully support its original chin and a healthy spare. Although he was only the age of the century, he had gray hair that stuck up in front in the style made famous by his former coworker Stan Laurel. Paddy still dressed more like the old vaudeville hand he’d once been than the successful businessman he now was. Today’s outfit was a double-breasted suit of the same unsubtle stripe as his vest. His silk shirt was the color of an egg yolk, and his tie and handkerchief shared blue polka dots.

This fashion plate operated a company called the Hollywood Security Agency. It provided discreet security services for the studios, which most often meant cleaning up the messes left by their stars. Paddy hadn’t set out to be a watchdog for spoiled actors. He’d come west in the last years of the silents, hoping, like thousands before and since, to become a spoiled actor himself. The best he’d done were a few turns as a heavy in Hal Roach comedies. He should have been a natural for talking pictures, as he had a deep voice with no sharp edges or accents. Not even an Irish one, though I could hear an echo of his immigrant parents in the way he formed his sentences. Instead of prospering, Paddy had gotten lost in the sea of new faces the talkies ushered in. He’d drifted into security work for Paramount, where I’d met him shortly before the war.

Not long after that, Paddy’s eye for the main chance had spotted a business opportunity. The big studios had seen the outbreak of war as a good excuse for cutting off the protection money they’d always paid the local police. Like Paddy, the payola dated from the silent days, and it had kept many a star out of the drunk tank and off the front pages. One result of the decision to stop the payoffs had been Errol Flynn’s celebrated 1942 trial for statutory rape, a message to the studios on the dangers of not playing ball. Another, quieter by-product had been the founding that same year of the Hollywood Security Agency by the enterprising Patrick J. Maguire.

“I noticed you were watching that screen pretty intensely,” Paddy said. “Bother you, did it?”

I shrugged and changed the subject. “Why a sequel? Sequels are for Frankenstein movies. Not for A pictures.”

“Passage to Lisbon wasn’t just any A picture,” Paddy said. “It was the surprise hit of 1942.” Then he added, “I meant the war angle. Did that get to you?”

I let the question beat itself to death against the soundproof walls. “Why didn’t they shoot this thing in ’43? Why did they wait four years?”

Paddy took out a cigar case and selected a six-inch corona. In his hand the big cigar looked like a brown cigarette. He bit off the end and spat it onto the carpet.

“Dirty habit, smoking,” he said. “They thought of a sequel right away, as a matter of fact. Something named Return Voyage, I’m told. They had a scenario worked up, but they never filmed it. It was too much of the Rover Boys meet the Nazis, with Tory Beaumont, Steve Laird I should say, sailing around blowing up things and escaping by the skin of his teeth. Not the same thing as Passage to Lisbon at all, you see. No love story. No human being story, for that matter.”

Paddy paused to light his cigar, rolling it over and over in the flame of a wooden match. “So nothing much happens for years, except that Beaumont becomes a big star on the strength of Passage to Lisbon and makes half a dozen movies that vaguely resemble it. Then out of nowhere one Bert Kramer comes up with a script for an actual sequel, and it’s a dandy. He’s a Warners screenwriter with mostly B pictures to his credit, but he’s a big fan of Passage to Lisbon. Kramer’s timing couldn’t have been better, what with Beaumont launching his own production company. Siren Productions it’s called. Tory needs a big hit to set himself on his feet, and this thing has box office written all over it.”

I dug out my pack of Luckies and tapped one free. Paddy had another kitchen match going before I had the cigarette in my mouth. I leaned toward the flame. “If the script’s so good, why are they scrambling for money?”

Paddy shook the match out with a single quick flip of his wrist. “You’ve never understood the business side of this business. There’s no such thing as enough money in Hollywood. The cast alone on this one could soak up a swimming pool full.”

“I heard Nigel Clay got a hundred thousand for a single day’s shooting.”

“That moonshine is straight out of a still in the publicity department. Not that Mr. Clay donated his services, mind you. But he’s not the only one at the trough. There’s also Ella Larsen. She’s not the greenhorn she was in ’42.”

“She’s signed though, hasn’t she?”

“Yes. So has the colored dance team, the Clausen Brothers, Eddie and Joe in the movie. The only holdout is that foreign fellow, Hans Breem. From what I hear, he’s not crazy about having the great Franz Wojcik, hero of the resistance, turned into a villain.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that myself. “So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “Find Hans Breem and break his fingers one by one?”

Paddy laughed regretfully. “No. Casting is someone else’s lookout. We’re here to see about this.” He reached into his breast pocket and removed a folded piece of paper. He opened the sheet ceremoniously and handed it to me.

On it was typed a single sentence: “Why are you using a Communist writer on Love Me Again?”

I whistled, softly.

“Exactly,” Paddy said. “What you’re holding is a typescript of the actual note, which, incidentally, was also typed and unsigned. The original was sent to no less a personage than Jack Warner himself. It put the wind up his holiness in no small way.”

That was easy to believe. Hollywood was currently buzzing about its latest Red scare. Representatives of something called the House Un-American Activities Committee were in town, sniffing around in people’s underwear drawers.

“Warner is scheduled to appear before the HUA Committee, isn’t he?” I asked.

Paddy glanced up to the projection room behind me. It must have been empty, because he said, “That’s just for show. He’s already testified. In secret, last spring. That doesn’t leave this room, by the way.”

I would have asked Paddy how he’d learned of Warner’s secret testimony if there was the slightest chance he’d tell me. Instead I asked, “Is Kramer a Communist?”

“Or was he, in his dewy youth?” Paddy countered. “That’s what we have to find out. Also, who sent the note? And can they be bought off or scared off or no? That’s the jackpot question. There are some influential parties at this studio who share your low opinion of sequels. They also wouldn’t mind seeing Beaumont’s production company fail. A hint of scandal, and they’ll be pushing to scrap the whole project.”

Paddy brushed some cigar ash from his vest, knowing without looking that there’d be some there to brush. “Warner Bros. is particularly sensitive about the charge of Communist sympathies on account of having made those pro-Soviet films during the war. What was that big one with Walter Huston? Something about Moscow.”

“Mission to Moscow,” I said. “With Ann Harding and Oscar Homolka.”

“Right,” Paddy said, smiling as he always did when my studied indifference to the movie business slipped. “Those pictures were the subject of Mr. Warner’s secret chat with the committee.”

“The Russians were our allies when those movies were made.”

Paddy nodded. “But now they head the list of all-time bogeymen. And the same Congressmen who shoveled arms and money to Stalin five years ago are today searching for his minions in the national basement. Politics is a strange business. Almost as screwy as motion pictures. When Hollywood and Washington get together, it’s best to be somewhere else entirely.”

“Sounds like the cue for an exit to me,” I said.

“Actually, it’s Scott Elliott’s entrance music. I’ve a feeling you’re just the man for this job.”

Finding the job I was just the man for was something of a preoccupation with Paddy. He’d taken me in after my discharge from the army, a move that spoke more of kindness than business sense. Like my boss, I was a former actor. To be precise, I’d been a contract player with Paramount for a couple of heady years before the war. I’d worked my way up to small parts in B pictures and an occasional walk-on in A’s before I’d won a little lottery called the draft. That had taken care of my open dates between 1942 and V-E Day. After that, I’d had all the free time in the world. Hollywood had changed while I’d been away, or I had changed. Probably we both had. I was as much in demand after the war as oleo margarine and meatless Tuesdays.

I should have packed up and moved back to Indiana, but somehow I hadn’t been able to. I might have ended up selling cars or leading tours of the movie stars’ homes, if Paddy hadn’t found me. He’d decided that, as I was an ex-soldier, I was tailor-made for security work. It was an understandable mistake, but my boss was not a man to admit a mistake, however understandable.

Paddy wore a golden chain across the front of his vest. He pulled at it now, reeling in a pocket watch the size of a demi-hubcap. “We’ve just time to make our appointment,” he said.

“Our appointment with whom?”

Paddy used his cigar to gesture toward the screen behind him. “Steven Laird, no less,” he said.

 

3

The Southern California morning was, as usual, severely overlit. I thought about putting on my sunglasses, but I knew they’d inspire some wry observation from Paddy. Something about the cheaters being a legacy from my salad days. I made do with pulling my hat brim down toward my nose. Paddy’s own hat, a homburg, sat on the back of his head, and he marched along, puffing on his cigar, like a prosperous baker taking the air on a Sunday afternoon. As we walked, Paddy nodded to people he knew. It was a steady process, Paddy’s circle of friends being only slightly smaller than Eleanor Roosevelt’s. At one point, he stopped to shoot the breeze with Jack Carson, a former bit player who’d made it big while I’d been away. Carson didn’t know me or seem interested in filling that void in his life, so I took in the scenery.

You’ve probably seen shots of Hollywood studios in a dozen different movies. A typical one might show groups of chorines in plumed hats, African natives also plumed, foreign legionaries, and men in top hat and tails all parading back and forth like they were using the soundstages for a giant game of musical chairs. Not exactly a true image, like every image out of Hollywood, and not an entirely false one either. On this particular morning the Warners lot looked less to me like Ringling Brothers Circus than the swing shift at Lockheed. It looked like a factory, in other words, running full bore, whose product just happened to be fairy dust.

When Paddy finished buttonholing Carson, he led me to soundstage number seven. The guard at the door greeted Paddy like an old lodge brother, which he was, in a way. Then he waved us through into an enclosed space that rivaled an aircraft hangar for size. It was largely wasted space on this particular day. I could see only two sets, neither very large. The one farthest from our door was lit with work lights. It was a cabaret of some sort and it was empty, except for a small chorus line in street clothes stepping through some blocking.

Next to the cabaret was a smaller, busier set. It was a single, shabby room—a dressing room for the cabaret probably—with a theatrical poster in French on one wall. There were two men in the pretend room, one seated at a dressing table and the other standing over the first in a menacing pose. The two stand-ins remained frozen in place like mannequins in a shop window, while half a dozen lighting technicians fussed over them. The process was supervised by a small, black-haired man in a silk shirt, jodhpurs, and riding boots.

“You recognize him, of course,” Paddy said, nodding toward the dark man.

“Cecil B. DeMille, I presume,” I said, tired by then of Paddy’s name dropping.

“Max Froy, you mean. The old pro who directed Passage to Lisbon. Beaumont’s leaving nothing to chance on this one.”

That judgment seemed unduly optimistic, given our current errand. It reminded me of a line in Passage to Lisbon, and I quoted it, loosely. “Fate’s already dealt itself in.”

Paddy missed the allusion. “It’s early days yet,” he said.

He led me to the quiet corner of the stage where Beaumont’s mobile dressing room stood. As we neared the trailer, its door opened and a harried looking man stepped out. He had a thin, pale face, hair that needed trimming, and oversize horn-rims. He carried a bundle of papers, and the collar of his jacket was turned up on one side. Central casting’s idea of a tyro college don, I thought, late for his first day of class.

The professor smiled and said hello to Paddy without breaking stride. For once, my boss had to be prompted for a name.

“Bert Kramer?” I asked.

“No,” Paddy said. “Fred Wilner, assistant to the coproducer, Vincent Mediate.”

Paddy reached the trailer door before it swung shut. The great man himself called to us to come inside. The trailer was the size of a blue-collar living room, and its interior was hazy with cigarette smoke. At the center of the cloud sat Torrance Beaumont, resplendent in a red silk dressing gown over a frayed shirt and cheap gray suit pants.

The internal contradictions of his outfit reminded me of the Hollywood insiders’ take on Beaumont: he was a sensitive, intelligent man who happened to make his living playing gangsters and grifters. At least he had before the war, when I’d almost been a Hollywood insider. Since then things had changed. Beaumont was another example of a supporting player who had risen to stardom since Pearl Harbor. He was the premier example, in fact, as there were few stars bigger than Beaumont in 1947. It was a case of the times catching up with the screen image, the times having been shifted into overdrive by the war. People no longer saw their heroes as godlike or even particularly pure. They’d seen too much or heard too much of the heroism of ordinary, imperfect men. They’d also learned the basic lesson of war: that good men with noble intentions do truly horrible things.

Beaumont had come to personify the new hero. His characters typically had shady, even criminal, pasts. They’d had their early idealism beaten out of them, and they wore the resulting disillusionment very much on their sleeves. Their cynicism took in everything from political systems to sexual relations. On this last point, however, the irresistible force of the new realism met the immovable object of Hollywood cliché, the cliché being that love was the ultimate transforming, ennobling force. For love, the Beaumonts of the world would rise up in the last reel and do whatever nasty, heroic work had to be done, often losing everything in the process.

Beaumont remained in his chair. Paddy stepped over to shake his hand and then turned to me. “This is Scott Elliott,” he said. “One of my top operatives.”

Instead of extending his hand, Beaumont ran a thumb along the edge of his jaw. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Before the war. At the Brown Derby. I slugged you.”

“Damn,” Paddy said.

I’d been at the Derby that night with some starlet I’d never met before, paired with her by a studio publicity genius and sent out with orders to see and be seen. The starlet had known someone at Beaumont’s table, and we’d stopped by to say hello. Beaumont, who’d had a few, had taken an unaccountable interest in me, nicknaming me “Handsome” and then “Hoosier” after he’d forced me to trot out a thumbnail autobiography.

I hadn’t met Beaumont before that night, but I’d heard about the game he liked to play. He would pick out some innocent party and goad him until said party was about to throw a punch. Then Beaumont would back down in such a way that the injured innocent would have no excuse to belt him. The challenge for Beaumont was seeing how far he could push the mark and get away with it, how much insult he could deliver with impunity. The goal was to leave his victim standing there as red and helpless as a fireplug after the dog has moved along.

I’d realized belatedly that Beaumont had selected me for the treatment. I’d seen only one way out.

“So you were in Second Chorus, huh?” Beaumont had asked, showing too many teeth as he smiled up at me. “Is it true what they say about chorus boys?”

The front of his dress shirt hadn’t given my left hand much purchase, but I’d still managed to lift him to his feet before I socked him. I hadn’t hit him hard—I didn’t known how to in those days—but it had been hard enough to rock his padded chair when he landed.

“No,” I’d said, as evenly as I could. “It isn’t true.”

End of flashback. On my walk to the trailer with Paddy, I’d worked out the odds of Beaumont remembering me as roughly slim to none. Seven years had passed since that night, and he’d been soused. But maybe not so soused as I’d thought. Or maybe his ribbing game didn’t often backfire quite that badly.

Beaumont smiled at me now the way he had at the Derby, showing only his upper teeth, but showing every bit of those. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I remember now. Scott Elliott. Two T’s followed by two more T’s. Must not have been a shortage of them in your family. You were an actor back then, or trying to be.”

“Trying to be,” I said.

He looked me up and down, taking in the quality of my suit. It was easy to take in, as I’d stupidly left my red silk dressing gown at home.

“Army?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Overseas?”

“Yes.”

“Rugged, was it?” His toothy grin had faded into nothing more than a solicitous smile.

“Every now and again,” I said.

“Have a seat.”

Paddy gave me a black look as we sat down, but said nothing. He took up most of a divan that rested against the same wall as the trailer’s door. I sat in a club chair on the opposite side of a small table from Beaumont. He pushed a box of cigarettes across the table to me.

To Paddy, Beaumont said, “Care for anything? Or is it too early in the day?”

Paddy glanced briefly toward the glass at Beaumont’s elbow, which contained water, neat. “A trifle early, I’m afraid,” Paddy said.

Beaumont studied us while he hunted for a loose piece of tobacco on his tongue. He was made up for the day’s work. His hairpiece was in place, and a phony five o’clock shadow had been painted on his cheeks. He’d aged visibly since the Passage to Lisbon days—his thin face thinner and his prominent eyes more prominent—but then the world had aged, too. Every new line on Beaumont’s face only made him more fitted for the role he’d been born to play, the weary, knowing fighter, struggling out of his corner for one last round.

“You know the layout, I guess,” he finally said.

“I’ve met with your Vincent Mediate,” Paddy said. “He explained the problem.”

“Mediate’s not my anything, pal,” Beaumont said. “He’s Jack Warner’s man. Ever since Hal Wallis jumped ship, Warner’s been looking for a new goose to lay his golden eggs for him. Mediate’s the latest goose in training. He worked on Broadway before the war, which makes him an automatic genius as far as the deep thinkers in this town are concerned. He’s supposed to be the liaison between Siren Productions and the studio, but he’s really the studio’s watchdog. I know that, and Mediate knows I know it, so we get along.”

“How does the studio feel about you and Siren?” I asked.

“The same way the British feel about Mahatma Gandhi. I’m an upstart, an ingrate, a lousy dresser, you name it. They’re hoping I’ll fail the way Cagney did and come back to them with my hat in my hand. That’s okay. All I want is a fair shot at the big money, and the big money’s in production. That’s been true since Theda Bara vamped her first parson. I’ve got just so many more years as a heartthrob left in me. After that, I’ll be living off my war bonds. That’s okay, too. Nobody lasts forever in this business. I just don’t want to end up one of those sorry old goats who’ve watched it all run through their fingers.”

He paused to light another cigarette. “That’s enough of my life story,” he said. “Let’s get down to cases. What are we to do about the note and how are we to do it?”

Paddy leaned forward slightly, his hands resting on his knees. “Tell us what you know about Kramer.”

“Practically nothing,” Beaumont said. “Except that he’s been kicking around the studio since ’40 or ’41.”

“Ever work with him before?” I asked.

“I heard he did some rewrites on one of my pictures. We Die at Dawn, I think. I’ve never met him. You don’t often meet the writers on a picture unless you make a point of it or there’s trouble.”

He meant script problems, but his comment gave Paddy an opening for the big question. “On the subject of trouble, is Kramer a Red?”

Beaumont shrugged. “He says no. Mediate went to talk with him yesterday. I wanted him to wait until you boys were on board, but that wasn’t fast enough for the big brass. Kramer denied everything in triplicate. Mediate seemed convinced.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“That none of this amounts to a piss in the ocean.” Beaumont leaned forward in his chair now, as Paddy had done. We three would have formed a huddle if I’d joined the movement. I stayed where I was.

“I don’t give a damn about Kramer’s politics or yours or Joe DiMaggio’s,” Beaumont said. “Politics don’t matter. It’s whether you can deliver the goods that counts. Kramer’s delivered, and if we want to make a picture, we’ve got to see him through this. We can’t whitewash the guy or undo any mistakes he made twenty years ago. So we’ve got to keep this quiet. You have to keep this quiet.”

“Did Kramer have any ideas on who the author of the note might be?” Paddy asked.

“If he did, he didn’t share them with Mediate.”

Paddy turned to me. “A talk with Mr. Kramer is on your agenda, then.”

Our client addressed me next. “After that, you can dust off your tuxedo. Mediate’s throwing a reception at the Stratford Hotel tonight. He and his wife are renting a suite there while the paint is drying on their new house out in the hills. They could have stayed on their yacht—also new—but Vince gets seasick. This reception’s for Love Me Again. Mediate’s wining and dining some of the money men from back East, and maybe getting some free ink out of the columnists, if he can pique their interest.”

“What’s supposed to be piquing my interest?” I asked.

Beaumont leaned back in his chair, smiling his mirthless smile again. “The original of the anonymous note was an interesting document,” he said. “It was typed on hotel stationery. Stratford Hotel stationery.”

 

4

While Beaumont was still savoring my reaction, a knock sounded on the trailer door. “Yes?” he said, without taking his eyes from me.

The reply wafted in through the trailer’s tin foil wall. “They’re ready for you, Mr. Beaumont.”

“Thanks, Willie. Be right there.”

Beaumont stood up, so Paddy and I did, too. The actor traded his dressing gown for a gray suit jacket that matched his worn pants. “Stay and watch the show if you want,” he said to Paddy. “We’re doing a master shot, so it should be easy enough to follow.” To me, he added, “You can hang around, too, if reliving the old days doesn’t poke a wound.”

There was another knock, and a large woman whose clothes were protected by a smock came in to touch up Beaumont’s makeup. She and Paddy went a long way toward filling the inside of the trailer. They waltzed around for a few bars getting out of each other’s way, and then Paddy made his exit, the trailer rocking slightly as he stepped down onto the soundstage. I followed him.

Paddy walked us to a lonely spot and then turned to face me, his hands in his pants pockets and his weight on his heels. “Why didn’t you tell me that your fist had made the acquaintance of Mr. Beaumont’s jaw?”

I thought of saying that it was his own damn fault for being so coy about the details of our assignment, for feeding me facts no faster than Gypsy Rose Lee dropped lingerie. But I’d never won an argument with Paddy.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll go home and make up a list of everyone I’ve pasted.”

He surprised me by smiling at that. “You’re a man of unsuspected qualities, Scotty,” he said. “And that’s a fact.”

He glanced toward the trailer, and I turned in time to see Beaumont step down from it, more lightly than Paddy had. We watched as he walked toward the waiting set.

Toscanini, walking out to the podium with the orchestra in place and the audience settled in, never got more attention than Beaumont commanded as he strode toward the set. It was an island of candlepower in the gloom of the soundstage. An individual’s ranking in the hierarchy of the proceedings was indicated by his position relative to the light. The actor supporting Beaumont in the scene was in the bright set itself, just one side of center. The cameraman was on the edge of the glow, flanked by Froy and his flunkies. The outer rings were formed by the sound people and the lighting technicians. Beyond them, in the full darkness, were the set hands and other hangers-on, whose only job during shooting was to stand still and keep quiet. The whole tableau reminded me of the Nativity scenes they used to set up outside the Catholic churches back home, with plaster angels and wise men and shepherds arranged in order of importance around the manger. This soundstage crèche lacked a Jesus, but Beaumont supplied that deficiency when he arrived at the center of the light.

“Isn’t that Fritz Taber on the set?” I asked.

“Yes,” Paddy said. “They wanted as many of the old hands from Passage to Lisbon as they could get. Besides which, Taber is something of a good-luck charm for Beaumont.”

“But his character died in Passage to Lisbon. Or did I dream that part?”

“He was lost overboard under mysterious circumstances,” Paddy said, nodding. “At least that’s what Steve was told. It’s pretty clever the way Kramer worked it out. I should tell you first that this scene they’re about to shoot takes place after the war. Steve has drifted to Paris, where he joins up again with Eddie and Joe, his tap dancing sidekicks from the Joyeuse Ile.

“Steve is drinking too much and wallowing in memories of his happy prewar days with Ella Larsen. What was her character called again?”

“Maura Wojcik,” I said.

“Ah, yes,” Paddy sighed. “Anyway, through American newspapers, Steve is keeping tabs on the career of Maura’s husband, Franz Wojcik. Wojcik has stayed on in America and become a leading figure in the new United Nations.”

“That’s slick. But what about Nigel Clay’s dying confession? Captain Manet’s, I mean. About Wojcik’s escape being a phony?”

“That’s what Steve is drinking to forget. But, of course, there isn’t enough liquor in Paris to work that miracle.”

Things were getting serious on the set. Beaumont had suggested a final lighting adjustment, one that benefited Taber, and the technicians were scrambling to get it done. Taber was seated at the set’s shabby dressing table. He was already in character, slumped over and hollow-eyed, as though he were being blamed for the entire miserable war and half-believed the charge.

The already quiet set downshifted to a new level of stillness. Paddy dropped his narrative to a whisper. “One night Steve is drinking in a club where Eddie and Joe are performing. Who should walk in but the drowned Fritz Taber.”

“Tursi,” I said, naming Taber’s character from the film.

“Tursi, right. Risen from his watery grave in the western Mediterranean. When Tursi recognizes the dancers as his old shipmates, he looks around nervously and tries to blow the joint. Steve heads him off and forces him into a back room.”

Paddy pointed toward the set. “This very one. There follows some of the lapel yanking and face slapping that passes for rough-house work in pictures. That brings us up to date, I think.”

Froy had been addressing the actors in a voice too low for me to hear. Now he called for quiet, his voice echoing across the perfectly noiseless stage. Beaumont was standing over the seated Taber, his left profile to the camera. Taber almost faced it, which told me that he would have most of the lines in the scene. Beaumont had called it a master shot, which meant they’d run through the scene from beginning to end without cuts. The resulting take, if successful, would provide the framework on which the edited scene would be built. Froy would order close-ups and reaction shots for certain lines, and the film’s editor would cut and splice these into the master shot to create the final scene.

The cameraman announced that the camera was running at speed. The kid with the clapboard stepped into the quality lighting and called out the scene and take numbers. Beaumont reached over and took hold of Taber’s jacket. Then Froy barked out, “Action!”

Beaumont released his hold, pushing Taber away from him at the same time. “Talk then,” Beaumont said. “While you’ve still got teeth.”

“Please don’t make me, Steve,” Taber said.

“Talk, or I’ll name you as a collaborator. You know what they’ve been doing to collaborators.”

Taber added genuine fear to his hunted expression. He looked up at Beaumont’s face as though searching for something. Friendship? Respect? That’s what the old Tursi had wanted from Steve on the Joyeuse Ile, the reason he’d shown him the Geneva Exemptions in the first place. That gambit hadn’t bought him anything, so he’d know better than to look for respect. Compassion then. Or humanity. Tursi might have expected to find those traits in the old Steve. His expression told me that whatever he’d expected to find was no longer there.

“All right. I’ll tell you,” Tursi said. “But you won’t thank me for it. You’ll hate me.” He shrugged resignedly, as though Steve’s hatred would make the world’s opinion unanimous.

“Franz Wojcik’s passage on the Joyeuse Ile was engineered by the Nazis. They arranged everything. His escape from the concentration camp. His flight across Europe.”

Steve interrupted him. “Franz Wojcik was a patriot. A hero of the Polish resistance.”

Tursi nodded. “He was. Until the Germans got him inside a concentration camp and tortured him.” He looked around the room, inviting a comparison between the beating Steve had given him and the Nazi torture.

“Have you ever been tortured, Steve? It’s worse than killing. The man lives on, but the spirit inside dies. The nobler the spirit, the worse the dying is. The emptier the man left behind is.”

“Meaning a cheap parasite like you wouldn’t notice the difference.”

Tursi smiled in sad agreement. “No. I wouldn’t. But Franz Wojcik did. After the Germans had broken him and learned everything he knew, there wasn’t enough spirit left inside him to fight them or even to take his own life. So he went to work for them. They arranged his escape from the camp, and then a whole series of more and more brilliant escapes as they moved him across Europe.”

“Why?” Steve asked. “To finger the local resistance leaders?”

“As he did on the ship,” Tursi said, his big head bobbing up and down. “Captain Manet happened to raid their meeting on the very night they took Wojcik in, you remember. But that was just part of the plan. The real reason for that two-year game of hide-and-seek was to build his reputation. To make the name Franz Wojcik known throughout the world. So that when the time came to move him to America, so that he could spy for the Nazis in America, he would be welcomed with open arms.”

Tursi’s reluctant confession became a torrent of self-reproach mixed with anger at the gullibility of Steve and the world he represented. “There were no Geneva inspectors murdered in Marseille. No real Geneva Exemptions even. My death was staged. Franz Wojcik’s every move aboard the Joyeuse Ile was staged. And you never suspected. The great Steven Laird. You fell for everything. You packed Wojcik off to that fat, stupid country of yours and yelled ‘bon voyage’ to him as he went!”

Tursi turned toward the dressing table and buried his face in his arms, sobbing. After a moment’s dazed hesitation, Steve grabbed Tursi’s shoulder and yanked him upright.

“What about Maura Wojcik?”

“Who?” Tursi asked in a small voice.

“Wojcik’s wife. Was she in on it? Did she know about Wojcik and the Germans?”

Tursi looked confused and frightened again. “I don’t know. I never heard. I never even saw her. I was smuggled ashore at Oran. I swear I don’t know.”

He raised his hand to ward off another blow, but Steve was almost calm now. “Are you still in your old business, Tursi? Black-market identification papers and exit visas, I mean.”

“Yes, Steve,” Tursi whimpered.

“Good. You’re going to get me some papers and a visa. Everything I need for a visit to America.”

Tursi nodded happily. “I’ll do it, Steve. Of course, I’ll do it. Anything for you, Steve. Just tell me what name to use.”

Steve looked into the empty air over Tursi’s head. “The name is Captain Roland Manet. Late of the Free French Navy.”

 

5

Paddy and I and the other onlookers thought so much of Taber and Beaumont’s performances that we gave them a hand. Mr. Froy was less impressed, or perhaps he was just the cautious kind of director. He ordered another take. While the director and his star were talking it over, Paddy and I slipped back out into the sunlight.

“Remind you of your old stand?” Paddy asked me after passing the soundstage guard a cigar and biting the end off another for himself.

I dug out my dark glasses. I had nothing to lose now by wearing them, as Paddy was already thinking about my previous incarnation. “Paramount was a lot classier,” I said. “They’d lower us onto the set with wires while a trumpet fanfare played.”

Paddy lit a match on the side of a stuccoed building. “In my day we had to help put up the set before we acted in front of it. And do our own makeup and take our own falls.”

“Did you work for Hal Roach or Mack Sennett? Next you’ll be telling me that you had to crank the camera and bake your own custard pies. Or was that Mabel Norman’s department?”

Paddy laughed his deep, slow laugh. “Maybe I am remembering back too far. It’s a fault we old hands have. You’ll find out about that one of these days. You’ll catch yourself telling people how you recommended Jolson for The Jazz Singer.”

“I recommended Eddie Cantor,” I said. “Story of my life.”

“Go ahead, wise guy, laugh away. The thirties are going to seem like the Garden of Eden to you someday, a perfect place you can never get back to.”

“They seem that way already.”

My true confession shut Paddy up for as long as it took us to walk to a spot of shade outside the studio commissary. He paused there and tossed cigar ash back in the direction we’d come. “What do you think of Mr. Kramer’s work?”

“He seems to have a lot of good ideas, but he uses them up pretty quickly. He put a load-and-a-half of exposition in that one little scene.”

“That’s Warner Bros.’ style. MGM would make four movies out of the plot these jokers cram into a single reel. Making Franz Wojcik a broken man turned Nazi spy, though, think your relations back in the corn belt will buy that?”

“I think with Fritz Taber selling it they could get away with making Wojcik a nun turned fan dancer.”

Paddy checked his watch. We must have been early for whatever was next on the agenda, because he continued to rock on his heels. “They’ve got more than Taber’s salesmanship working for them. They’ve also got Hans Breem’s performance from the original film. I’ve always thought it was the only off note. Too passionless. Too uninspired. I could never picture anyone following that iceberg onto the barricades.”

“Not even when he was playing Chopin?” In that famous scene, Wojcik had disrupted a Nazi songfest by commandeering a piano and banging out the Heroic Polonaise, which had become a wartime theme song for the Polish resistance.

“Not even then,” Paddy said. “Remember how the piano player waited to get Beaumont’s permission before he gave Wojcik his bench? Even a musician wouldn’t follow Wojcik, and they’re natural anarchists. No, there was always something missing in that bird, but now that negative will seem like a positive. After people see Love Me Again, they’ll think back on Breem’s performance in Passage to Lisbon and decide it was right on the money.”

“Assuming anyone gets to see Love Me Again,” I said.

“That’s what makes Hollywood Security great, positive thinking. Hop over now and see how far Bert Kramer is actually leaning to the left. I’m going to find Vincent Mediate and get the lowdown on this little soiree he’s throwing tonight. I’ll find my own way back to the office.”

Paddy didn’t know where the writers were hidden away. The first passerby I asked, who was either a carpenter or an actor made up to play one, directed me to a small building behind the administrative offices. It was called the Writers Building, originally enough, and it was painted white, like every building Warners owned. This one was in serious need of touching up, though. Something told me that the roof leaked when it rained, too. Each of the building’s three stories was broken up with the kind of windows that crank outward. I judged from the windows standing open that roughly half the offices were occupied, which made my chances of finding Kramer no better than even money.

The receptionist was a Maria Montez type with dark, wavy hair and even darker eyes. She was a little over fighting weight, but then so was Maria Montez these days. She had no idea whether Bert Kramer was in, but she gave me his office number—317—and the run of the building.

Someone was at home on the third floor. From the stairwell I picked up the sound of a ball being bounced against a wall, music being played on a phonograph with an old needle, and voices arguing about the Yankees’ chances in the current pennant race. I could even hear the sound of a typewriter being pecked at in a tentative, pessimistic way. The third floor had a central hallway lit only by dusty sunlight escaping from the offices whose doors were standing open. Office 317 was not contributing to this effort. I knocked on its door and then tried the knob. The door was locked, but it didn’t have the kind of hardware that would keep anyone but small children and clergymen out. Paddy Maguire could have opened it with a deep breath.

I was looking around for witnesses when a voice called “hello” from the next office. It was a woman’s voice, and the woman it belonged to was seated at a desk. The desk wasn’t big, but it almost filled the office. There was just enough room left over for me, a filling cabinet, and the pair of pictures that graced the walls. They were framed lobby cards from Each Dawn I Die, an old Cagney epic.

“Help me out,” the woman at the desk said. She was small and slender and pushing fifty with both hands. Her brown hair had a red tint and permanent waves that were crisper than the crease in my trousers. “What’s another word for eschew? A simpler one, I mean.”

“You’ve got it backwards,” I said. “You end up with words like eschew. You don’t start with them. You start with shun or avoid and work your way up.”

“Not when you’ve been writing for pictures as long as I have, honey. Old scribblers like me just naturally write prismatic when we mean colorful and ethereal when we’re trying to say thin. It’s a fight every day to get back to the language of the living. You looking for Bert?”

She pointed to an open connecting door with her pencil. Through it, I could see Kramer’s office, which was dark and empty.

“I was.”

“He’s home hiding, letting his baby bride massage his tired brow. Some altercation or wrangle, I mean, or …”

“Dustup?”

“Thanks. A dustup with that kid producer Mediate. For years, Kramer’s been the kind of dedicated professional, by which I mean hack, that you couldn’t poison with a barrel of red ink. But since he wrote that Passage to Lisbon reprise, he’s developed artistic pretensions in the battleship class. I guess I don’t blame him. It’s the best thing he’s done or is likely to do and he can’t stand the thought of it being marred or ravaged or…”

“Fouled up,” I said.

“Exactly. God knows it happens often enough. The scripts that go out of here are works of pure genius. And you’ve seen the finished products. It’s shameful.”

“Ignominious, you mean.”

She smiled, showing teeth that looked a little yellow against the white of her face powder. “You’re a quick study. My name’s Hanks. Florence Hanks. What’s yours, kid?”

I told her my name, and she repeated it a few times until she got the rhythm down. “Paramount had a youngster named Scott Elliott kicking around before the war. I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Me either,” I said. “How well do you know Kramer?”

“What’s your interest?”

“It’s confidential.”

“You a federal agent or something?”

“Insurance agent.”

“Uh huh. Bert Kramer and I have been answering each other’s phones here in the kennel for donkey’s years. But I wouldn’t say I really know him. Most writers, even glorified scribblers like us, are basically selling bits and pieces of their autobiographies, hashing and rehashing the one plot they’ve actually lived. Not Bert Kramer. If there’s a story in his past, he’s saving it for Broadway. But he’s a pro. Give him some magazine filler by Edna Ferber and a couple of weeks and he’ll bang out a treatment. It’ll end up playing the bottom half of double bills, maybe, but second features make money, too.”

“Love Me Again is no second feature,” I said. “Not from what I’ve seen of it.”

“That’s why Bert is suddenly having fainting spells. When you’ve only got one pass at the brass ring, you want to make the most of it.”

“How about politics? A lot of writers wear their politics on their sleeves. Does Kramer?”

Florence frosted over ever so slightly. “No,” she said. “Quite the opposite. He’s not much of a one for current affairs. I’d be surprised if Bert knows that Roosevelt is dead. He would have missed the whole war, if Warners hadn’t sent him to Washington to work on some movie for the War Department. The studios rotated writers back and forth all through the fighting. I think Bert’s contribution was a short subject on trench foot.

“Well,” she added pointedly, “I’d better get back to work.”

Breaking and entering was out with Florence on guard, so I scrapped my plan to search Kramer’s office for copies of Bolsheviks’ Home Companion. That left talking to the man himself. “Do you happen to know Kramer’s home address?” I asked from the doorway.

“Theresa, down at the front desk, can give it to you. Flash those baby blues of yours at her and she’ll throw her own address in for good measure.” She gave me a last narrow-eyed examination. “I suppose you’ve never even heard of Paramount.”

“Sure I have. They make the Popeye cartoons. I’m a sucker for Olive Oyl.”

 

6

Theresa gave me Bert Kramer’s address, but didn’t volunteer her own. My baby blues weren’t what they used to be, I guess. I hiked back out through the main gate and retrieved my car from the rental lot where I’d parked it. The lot attendant, a skinny kid in overalls, gave my bus a professional examination as he handed me my keys.

“LaSalle,” the attendant said, reading the scrollwork on the narrow grille. “Don’t see too many of these.”

“Before your time, kid,” I said, sounding to myself like one Patrick J. Maguire.

“Thirty-nine?” the kid asked.

“1940,” I said. A bad year for isolationists and London real estate prices, but a great one for LaSalles. The last one, in fact.

To be specific, my car was a LaSalle Series 52 Special Coupé, cream colored with as much chrome as a showroom full of Chevrolets, not that you could find a full showroom in 1947. It was the latest thing in prewar styling, with headlights that were almost blended into the rounded front fenders, which in turn were almost blended into the sleek body. I’d bought the coupé during my flush time at Paramount. It hadn’t been Gary Cooper’s Duesenberg by any stretch of the imagination, or even as classy as LaSalle’s big sister marque, the Cadillac. But I’d felt as though I’d genuinely arrived the day I’d driven it home.

Little did I know that I’d shortly be in the army and the whole LaSalle line would be in the history books. I’d thought about selling the car when my number came up, but that had seemed a little too much like settling my estate. So I’d stored it on blocks in a friend’s garage in Pasadena. It was there waiting for me in 1945, looking just as I’d left it, except for a protective coating of greasy dust and four empty wheel rims, my friend having generously donated my whitewalls to the war effort.

I’d paid a lot of money for a set of blackwalls that didn’t last a year, but it had been worth it to have one small piece of my civilian life back. Any car was worth having in those days, but even after production started to catch up with demand, I kept the LaSalle. A little too flashy, a little out of date, the car and I seemed made for each other.

I tried to gauge the parking lot jockey’s age and decided that his high school graduation was a recent memory, if by chance he’d stuck around for the ceremony. My guess was he hadn’t. He had a rawboned, rangy look that seemed out of place in prosperous, complacent Burbank, California.

“Where you from?” I asked him.

“Normal,” the kid said, adding “Illinois” as an afterthought.

“I’m from the Midwest myself,” I said. “Indiana, that is.”

“Sure you are,” he said. He lifted one overalled leg. “Pull the other one.”

“Have it your way,” I said.

As I settled in behind the wheel of the LaSalle, the young skeptic stepped up to its open window. “I saw a picture of the new Packard Clipper today. The ’48. It’s gonna make this tub of yours look like a Model T.”

“Have fun parking them.”

I drove off wondering what had brought the kid from Normal, Illinois, to Unnormal, California, or greater Los Angeles, as the locals were starting to call it. It hadn’t been movie fever, a disease I’d experienced firsthand. The kid had lacked the classic symptom, a dazed glow. What then? I’d noticed the trend before Pearl Harbor, but it had greatly accelerated since, perhaps due to the thorough shaking the war had given the country: people with no particular ambition were gravitating toward Los Angeles. The movement wasn’t the frenzied stampede of a gold rush or an oil strike. It was more like a mass wandering that happened to end in a single spot, the common end of rainbows connected to every small town in America. Whatever its cause, the migration was making Southern California one interesting place to live.

Kramer’s address was in West Hollywood, just off Santa Monica. It was a nice enough older neighborhood, but a little too close to the burgeoning commercial development along the boulevard. The actual house was a twenties bungalow on a burned out half acre. The grass was dead, but the tecoma bushes that bordered the front porch were thriving. So much so that they almost blocked the front steps. I pushed branches aside like Randolph Scott parting the swinging doors of a saloon and stepped up into the cool quiet of the porch. The quiet turned out to be a passing phase. My finger was an inch from the electric bell when a storm broke inside the house.

“Damn it, Violet,” a man’s voice said. “Can’t you even keep ice in the goddamn house? What are you good for? Huh? Will you tell me that? You’re not functional. And you’re sure as hell not ornamental. Is there a category I’m missing? Give me a goddamn clue. While you’re at it, tell me what’s eating up your free time. Are you working on the side for J. Edgar Hoover? Are you doing polio research? Or is the problem your afternoons at the motel with Ronald goddamn Colman? Tell me anything that explains why I come home day after day and find you sitting around reading movie magazines with dust on everything deep enough to plow. And no ice in the house!”

That was where I’d come in. I leaned on the doorbell for a long ten count. When I took a breather, I heard blissful silence followed by the sound of footsteps shuffling my way.

The door was opened by a woman who had the look of a spaniel left out in the rain. Her brown eyes were round and huge and wet and her small, pointed features were unnaturally pale. That detail seemed wrong to me. If she’d been standing up under the grilling I’d overheard, she should have been red to the roots of her frazzled hair, which was the color of old carpet matting and almost as lustrous. Florence Hanks had described her as Kramer’s baby bride, and she probably wasn’t thirty, but she was nobody’s baby. Something had beaten the spirit out of her, if she’d had any to begin with. Or someone had, namely Bert Kramer.

All of which assumed that the man I’d been listening to was the missing screenwriter and the woman before me was his wife. The last assumption was easy enough to verify. I touched the brim of my hat. “Mrs. Kramer?”

She dropped her eyes to the doorsill, which I took for a yes. “I’m from the studio,” I said, more or less truthfully. “I’d like to speak with your husband.”

She moved aside without a word. I stepped past her into a room overdecorated in dated florals. There were flowers in the rug, flowers in the curtains and the wallpaper. Even the paper shade of the standing lamp had a fringe of faded roses. No need to garden in the hot California sun when you could do it in the comfort of your parlor.

Bert Kramer didn’t rise to greet me. He was busy filling a leather armchair that sat like a throne against the room’s far wall. He was the right man for the job of filling armchairs, as he was fat from the earlobes down. He wore his black hair short and slicked back, like a shiny skull cap. His broad face was also shiny in the heat of the afternoon, and his small eyes were red rimmed. He was overdressed for a day away from the office, in a white shirt and striped tie and the vest and pants of a worn blue suit. His only concessions to the heat were his shoes, which were missing. Or perhaps he just wanted to show off his socks, snazzy ones with a zigzag pattern in yellow and green. There was a radio cabinet on one side of his chair and a jumbo ashtray with legs on the other. On the edge of this smoking table was a tumbler of light brown liquid, sans ice cubes.

“Who the hell are you?” Kramer demanded. “And don’t hand me that line about being from the studio. I know every flunky in that sorry place.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not from the studio. I’m from the bowling alley down the block. We’d like you to cut out the racket. We can’t hear the pins falling.”

Kramer grunted. “Every bum in this sorry town is a genius with dialogue. Or thinks he is. Where I come from, even the stutterers could top you.”

“Where would that be?” I asked, although Kramer’s clipped delivery had already told me.

“Brooklyn, New York,” he said. “Now answer my question. Who are you?”

For some reason I didn’t feel like answering him. I dug out one of the fancy cards Paddy liked his employees to carry. Kramer leaned forward in his chair to pluck the card from my hand.

“Hollywood Security Agency,” Kramer read. “I’ve heard of you guys. You nursemaid ham actors through their tantrums and deliver starlets from the clutches of evil producers. Or is it deliver them to the producers?”

“Depends on our mood,” I said.

“Well, I’m not the nervous type and I’ve got no starlets hidden under my bed, so I don’t need any Hollywood operatives following me around.”

“Torrance Beaumont and Vincent Mediate think differently,” I said. “As for who’s hiding under your bed, someone seems to think it’s Joseph Stalin.”

That shut Kramer up for a few ticks of the hall clock. Then he moved his head in the direction of his wife, who was still standing by the front door. The small eyes stayed on me, though.

“That ice isn’t going to make itself,” Kramer said.

Violet shuffled past me and out through a doorway toward the sound of the ticking clock. Kramer waited until her dancing footsteps had faded away. Then he said, “I told Mediate that letter was the bunk. I’m telling you the same thing. I am not a member of the Communist Party or any of its front organizations or any other kind of organization for that matter. Not even the damn Screen Writers’ Guild. I never have been a member of any Commie group. Anybody who says I have been is a damn liar.”

“Any idea who this particular liar might be?”

Kramer gave that one some serious thought, probably the latest in a long line of serious thoughts on the same question. “No,” he finally said.

“Since you’re not a Communist and never have been, what motive would anyone have for accusing you?”

Kramer gave that question no thought at all, serious or otherwise. “Jealousy,” he said. “It’s the lifeblood of Hollywood. I’m about to make the big time, and somebody can’t stand it.”

“Another writer?”

“No,” Kramer said. “I don’t think so. Not that we’re above some mild backstabbing over at the Writers Building. A lot of that stems from the way the producers cover their bets at Warners. It isn’t uncommon to have two or three writers working on the same project and none of them wise to the others. Divide and conquer, that’s Jack Warner’s favorite strategy. It makes for some pretty fierce scrambling for screen credit, let me tell you.

“But that can’t be what’s going on here. Nobody else has been working on Love Me Again for the very good reason that no one else knew about it until I had it finished and perfect. So there can’t be any back-room fighting over who wrote what. Besides which, no writer outside of a rubber room would encourage a witch hunt. Nobody’s safe when something like that gets started. No, it can’t be a writer.”

“Who else but a writer would be jealous of a writer?”

Kramer’s sweaty face became a study in incredulity. “Are you kidding me? What freight train did you get in on? Everybody in this town is jealous of the writers. It’s the reason the writers are the serfs in this kingdom. We should be leading the damn circus parade. Instead, we’re following along behind it with shovels and buckets. You know why that is?”

“You mix your metaphors?”

“We have too much talent, wiseass. In the beginning was the word. It was true at the start of the world and it’s true in this travesty of creation we call Hollywood. The words come first. If they’re no good, nothing that any set designer or director or ham actor does will matter a damn. If the words are perfect, the best you can hope is that the studio won’t screw them up too badly on the way to the screen.”

I recognized a rephrasing of Florence Hanks’s lament. Kramer shook his head at the inequity of the world. “I should write novels,” he said. “You don’t collaborate with a novel. You don’t compromise.”

“With your luck, they’d probably misspell your name on the dust jacket.”

Kramer had been addressing the ceiling. Now he fixed his little eyes on me. “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

That stopped me cold. I had taken a dislike to Kramer, and I didn’t know why. He was a client, after all, not my blind date. I should have been deferential. Or, at worst, indifferent. Instead, I was riding him. It could have been his socks or the gentle way he’d spoken to his wife. Or it could have been the idea of him tampering with a certain movie.

“How did you come to write Love Me Again?” I asked.

The change of subject relaxed Kramer visibly. He settled a little lower in his chair and reached for his iceless drink. “Just too sentimental by half, that’s me,” he said. “Most writers are, under our stony facades. Hollywood writers, anyway. We get sentimental about our characters. Hell, we spend enough time with some of them. More than we do with real people.”

He glanced briefly toward the exit Violet had used before continuing. “I’m sentimental like that. I hate to kill a character off or leave one standing around unhappy. I hate to plain leave them hanging. The end of Passage to Lisbon left a busload of them hanging.”

“But they weren’t your characters,” I said.

“Hell,” Kramer said. “They’re everybody’s. That’s what I think. You could say they’re Lester Ferrell’s. He’s the kid who wrote “Port of Call,” the short story Passage to Lisbon was based on.”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“Not too surprising, seeing how it was never published. It came to Warners’ story department as an unsolicited submission. Or you could say that the characters belong to the Tierney brothers, Charlie and Bill, who wrote the first draft of the script, or Clark Gray, who rewrote it. Hell, you might as well throw in Tory Beaumont. Steve Laird was tailored to the screen character Beaumont had been building up for years. Then, though, you’d have to credit all the writers and directors who pointed Beaumont that way.”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

“No you don’t,” Kramer said in his charming way. “When I say the Passage to Lisbon characters belong to everybody, I’m not talking about who wrote what. I’m talking about the way the movie went over. The way people still feel about it. The way they feel about Steve and Maura, like they’re family. People want those two to be happy. Which is what a sentimental writer like me wants for his characters.”

Kramer took a long, sentimental drink, nearly emptying his glass. “Come on, admit it. Haven’t you ever wanted Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara to get back together?”

“How about Romeo and Juliet?” I asked. “Maybe they were just holding their breath.”

“We’re not talking about Shakespeare here, pally. Not that I couldn’t have improved a few of his fade-outs. We’re talking about standard Hollywood issue. What’s wrong with a happy ending?”

“Nothing,” I said, “If that’s the way it happens to work out. A lot of times, it doesn’t.”

“So that’s it, is it?” Kramer looked me over as though I’d just walked into the scene. I thought he was going to ask me about the war, about the men I’d killed or seen killed, about all the unhappy endings I’d been forced to sit through.

Instead, he said, “You’re that kind of fan. The goddamn purist. You don’t think anybody should be tampering with Passage to Lisbon because it’s a goddamn work of art. It’s the one the studio system accidentally got right. You don’t think any hack like me should be tampering with the ending. You think I’m painting a moustache on the goddamn Mona Lisa.”

Kramer was closer to the mark than he knew. I felt the truth of his insight in the moist heat rising upward from my collar. But I wasn’t about to let on.

“It’s Bert Kramer’s ending you should be worried about,” I said. “You could be close to a fade-out yourself if this charge sticks.”

Kramer smiled and finished the last swallow of his drink. “Don’t worry about my ending, pally. It’ll be a happy one. Something straight out of Frank Capra.”

“That’s if you’re writing it,” I said. “Suppose Vincent Mediate is at the typewriter.”

“Our wonder-boy producer? Listen, just between you and me, Mediate couldn’t type his name. But don’t you worry about old Vince. He’s a war hero, isn’t he? Carried his whole crew off the beach at Normandy while filming away with a camera clamped in his teeth. Old Vince will carry me, too. Wait and see.”

 

7

I thanked Kramer for his hospitality and left the way I’d come, through tecoma pass and across the alkaline desert of the bungalow’s front yard. Then I drove to a drug store on Santa Monica Boulevard and called the Hollywood Security Agency. The fan in the drug store’s phone booth was broken, so I left the folding door open and stretched my legs. Other legs were being rested nearby. Long, slender ones that belonged to a couple of bobby-soxers who were seated at the fountain, practicing their eyelash batting on a lucky soda jerk. I enjoyed the show while I listened to the ringing on the other end of the line.

Her nibs answered the phone herself, to use Paddy’s favorite nickname for his wife, Peggy. She had been his partner on the stage once upon a time, and now she was his business partner. She was the actual businessman of the pair, although her attitude toward Paddy’s lost-sheep employees leaned a little toward the maternal. I was poor little lamb number one.

“Scotty,” she said, “have you eaten anything?”

I smiled at the phone. “Not yet, Peg.” One of the kids at the counter turned toward the sound of my voice. She caught my eye and looked away quickly. Then she slowly glanced back, her long brown hair masking one side of her face, Veronica Lake style.

“You must be famished,” Peggy said.

“Wasting away,” I said. Veronica smiled and looked back to her friends.

“It figures. Paddy lets you do the legwork while he talks some big shot out of a fancy lunch.”

“Vincent Mediate,” I said.

“That’s the sucker. His lordship is sleeping it off right now.”

“I’ll call back, then.”

“Oh no. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to sound reveille. You just hold the line.”

After a minute or so, Paddy came on, alert and unabashed. “Scotty. I’ve just been turning this business over in my mind.”

“So I was told.”

I heard the sound of a match being struck, perhaps on one of Paddy’s chins. “You first,” he said. “What did you learn from Kramer?”

“That he’s a sentimental slob, though you wouldn’t guess the sentimental part by looking at him. He wasn’t at his office. I thought about searching it, but he’d left a neighbor on guard. I tracked him to his castle. He’s holed up there.”

“Too bad about the office. What did you learn on the subject of his political leanings?”

I eased my legs into the booth and shut the door. “Hasn’t any. Or so he says. Couldn’t tell a Red from a redcap.”

“What about the sender of the note?”

“He suspects everybody between Santa Barbara and San Diego. Except other writers.”

“Huh,” Paddy said. “They must be a tight-knit crew. Not much there to work on. Maybe you’ll have better luck tonight at Mediate’s little fund-raiser. The layout is just the way Beaumont described it. You’re to be there at eight. Your contact is Mediate’s assistant, Fred Wilner. You almost met him this morning.”

“I remember. What am I supposed to be doing there? Besides frisking everyone for hotel stationery, I mean.”

“Meeting Mr. Mediate mostly. He wants to size you up. Feel free to pump him while he’s giving you the once over. A very close man is Mr. Mediate. I’ve met with him twice now, and I know more about the plot of his blooming movie than I do about him.”

The operator came on at that point to ask for another nickel. I gave her one. It was a nickel wasted, as Paddy was anxious to get back to his meditation.

“Take the rest of the day off,” he said. “You’ll kill most of it getting out to that log cabin of yours anyway. Go home and lay out your best bib and tucker.”

“Shouldn’t I be doing some more poking around?”

“Into what? Kramer’s background? I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. We could never prove he isn’t a Red. Not when an inclination is enough to get a person branded. The only concrete thing we could do is prove he is one, and nobody wants that.

“No, Scotty. At the moment, this is a hand-holding job, pure and simple. Show up on time tonight and hold whatever hand is offered.”

“You’re the boss,” I said.

 

The thing to buy and hold on to in prewar Los Angeles had been land, so naturally, I hadn’t bought an acre. That oversight kept me from making my fortune when the value of orange groves skyrocketed during the fighting. Worse, it meant I’d end up caught in the postwar housing squeeze.

In ’47, I was living outside of the city in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains. An old friend from my Paramount days had an estate there, and she was nice enough to rent me a cottage on a quiet corner of her land. The rent was nominal, due to a services clause in my verbal lease. It required me to shoot any mountain lions I saw. As I never saw any and I didn’t own a gun, this provision was no problem at all.

The cottage was set down in a little wash of scrub oak and pine, out of sight of the main house. It was reached by a rickety flight of wooden steps. I left the LaSalle in its sandy spot by the side of the road and made the descent, causing the usual panic among the ground squirrel population.

The front door was unlocked, as I’d left it. I opened the one or two windows that weren’t already open and hung my hat and suit coat and tie on the various door knobs I passed on my way to the single bedroom’s single closet. I took my tuxedo out and laid it on the bed, as Paddy had instructed. It didn’t look any better on the bed—any more stylish or any less tired—but orders were orders. With that out of the way, I was a free man. I put one of my newer Duke Ellington records, “I’m Just a Lucky So and So,” on my portable player and then moved into the combination kitchen and bar.

One of the ways the men in my old unit had gotten through their time in the field was by imagining themselves doing perfectly ordinary things. Soldiers everywhere knew the same trick, I’m sure, but it had become a mild obsession with us. In quiet moments, we’d told each other in great detail how we would someday perform again some absolutely routine civilian task, making coffee, say, or changing the spark plugs on a car. As most of the men in my outfit had hailed from Tennessee, some of our recitals had been on the secrets of skinning a squirrel or curing a frying pan.

The subject of my own contribution to this lecture series had been “Mixing a Gibson.” I’d mixed dozens of them verbally for my captive audience, discussing as I mixed the virtues of various gins and vermouths, the characteristics of pearl onions, the advantages of stirring over shaking.

Later, after the fighting had ended, five of us had found ourselves in a tiny hotel bar on the outskirts of Paris. There, under the curious gaze of the bartender, I’d mixed five Gibsons, one at a time, with hands that had actually trembled. We’d raised them in a toast to nothing in particular or maybe to everything.

The faces of those farm boys had been as alive with light as the cocktails themselves as we’d stood staring at our glasses. Then we’d drunk, and the lights had blinked out, one by one. The magic of the moment had disappeared, trampled by a chorus of orders for beer chasers. The real Gibsons had failed to live up to the expectations created by months of imaginary ones, even for me. It had been a foretaste of my return to civilian life, though I hadn’t recognized that nuance at the time.

Despite that notable failure, I’d stuck to Gibsons. I still reveled in the silliness of mixing one as though it were the most important operation of my life. I made a shakerful now, measuring the ingredients with a precision that would have lit a smile under William Powell’s pencil-line moustache. Then I took the shaker and a long-stemmed glass and a phial of onions and left the cottage.

I climbed the rickety stairs and followed the road until it intersected a roughly cut firebreak. I left the road, climbing the hill the break had scarred until I came to its summit. There I sat down on a slab of rock awash in dry, spiky weeds.

To my right was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.’s house, though I couldn’t see it for the trees. I wasn’t looking for it anyway. The view I was after was the one that stretched out before me, the gray blue blur of Los Angeles. At night, with a million lights burning, it was a more impressive sight. But this late afternoon version was worth the walk. Worth all the walks I’d taken, in fact.

Once I’d actually dreamt of conquering a small, select part of Los Angeles. That vague and naive ambition had been replaced by a simpler one during the war: staying alive, existing, being. It was an imperative that hadn’t faded with the end of the fighting. I still just wanted to occupy a quiet place somewhere. The closest I’d come to a return to my old, silly dream had been to define the quiet place more narrowly. I just wanted to be here, in greater Hollywood.

I coaxed one onion from its jar and into the bottom of my glass, where I drowned it in gin and vermouth. Then I raised the cocktail in a toast to the hazy horizon.

“It’s still good to be back,” I said.

 

8

The Stratford was a big old pile on the edge of Beverly Hills. The hotel made me think of a back-lot set, one that had stood in for so many different countries it no longer had a single, recognizable identity. The name was vaguely English, while the facade quoted classical Greece. The lobby was from a later flowering of civilization, namely the silent movie period. Some more recent redecorators had tried to mute its original Arabian Nights motif, but it was still possible to imagine Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayers stamping out a tango through its arched passageways.

The orchestra I could hear as I crossed the lobby was more up-to-date. And more restful. When I entered the first-floor room the studio had rented, the string section was crooning “Something to Remember You By” in tones muted enough for a wake. A wake is what the gathering resembled at that moment. It was just after eight, but there were only a dozen guests assembled, none of whom were straying very far from the bar.

The orchestra was too good for its small, inattentive audience. I recognized the leader as a trumpet virtuoso named Tony Ardici who’d played with some of the bigger West Coast bands before the war. A gang of us had driven down to Long Beach to hear him play on a soft summer night that now seemed farther away than the moon.

Fred Wilner was easy to spot among Ardici’s current listeners. He was standing in a quiet corner, cleaning his glasses with a huge handkerchief. Without them, he looked like an undergraduate. A nearsighted one. He put the glasses back on as I walked up.

“Hello,” he said. “Elliott, isn’t it?” He spoke with a Southern accent I hadn’t noted when he’d greeted Paddy earlier in the day.

As we shook hands, I asked, “You’re Mr. Mediate’s assistant?”

“That’s right. I’d worked my way up to better things before the war. Now I’m working my way up all over again. But at least I’m around to do it. You were in the field artillery, I hear.”

It had become a ritual since the war for men of our generation to compare service records upon meeting. “Yes,” I said.

“In France?”

“And points east.”

“How was that line of work?”

I glanced around the ballroom. Its motif was Egyptian. I took in the plaster-of-Paris pillars ending in a flourish of reeds and supporting plaster-of-Paris ceiling beams on which were painted slaves and pharaohs and the odd Cleopatra. The carpet was a huge secret message written in hieroglyphics, and the green curtains behind the orchestra featured Ra, the sun god, done in faded gold. “It lacked glamour,” I said. “How about you?”

“Infantry. New Guinea. We were a little short of atmosphere ourselves.”

I gave Wilner a closer examination. He seemed as ordinary as a Wednesday morning, which was how most real infantrymen looked. But with his polished horn-rims in place, it was hard to picture him slogging along in the mud.

“Officer?” I asked.

“Yes, but don’t hold it against me. I was only a lieutenant.”

“How about your boss? I hear Mediate was a regular Audie Murphy.”

“Who told you that?”

“Bert Kramer.”

Wilner chuckled. “All Bert knows about war he learned from reading his own scripts.”

“Is he here yet?”

“Kramer? God no. He isn’t going to be here, either. Wasn’t invited. Wasn’t even notified. Until this business about the letter is cleared up, we’re keeping him under wraps. If things get too bad, we might have to use someone else’s name for the screenwriter credit.”

“Kramer would love that,” I said. “He thinks the whole town is after him as it is.”

Wilner sighed. “Don’t I know it. We’ll end up throwing more money at him. That’s how you deal with the Bert Kramers of this world.”

“What’s the story on Mediate?”

“He’s up in his suite having cocktails with the New York big shots. Once they’re sufficiently fortified, they’ll come down here and face the press.” He nodded toward the little crowd by the bar.

“I meant Mediate’s war record. Kramer said something about Normandy.”

Wilner pushed his glasses back up his nose for the fourth or fifth time. “Right. He was there heading up a combat film crew.”

“Like those directors they drafted? George Stevens and John Ford?”

“Nothing as grand as that. At least it wasn’t supposed to be. Stevens and Ford and John Huston were overseas to make films. Vincent Mediate was just supposed to be exposing film. There were units like Vince’s in every theater of the war. They were there to film combat and send their stuff back to the States for editing. Sergeant Mediate exceeded his orders.”

“How?”

“First I should tell you about Normandy. Vince and two of his men landed on Omaha Beach with one of the first waves. His cameraman was hit right off the bat. Vince took over the filming himself. Some time later, his other assistant caught shrapnel in both legs. Vince carried him to what passed for an aid station in that hellhole. Then he went back to filming.”

“He wasn’t hit himself?”

“Not a scratch. After the breakout, some colonel who’d seen the film crew in action told Vince he was recommending him for a medal. Vince asked to be allowed to edit his footage into a film instead. This colonel happened to report to a general who had advanced ideas on publicity. They set it up for Mediate to do the work back in England, at Teddington Studios, which are owned by Warner Bros. That’s how Vince first came to Jack Warner’s attention, through the studio grapevine.

“Anyway, the short he put together, Sunrise at Normandy, caused a sensation when it was finally shown over here.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “It’s great. I didn’t know it was Mediate’s.”

Wilner gave his glasses another shove. “Put him on the map. That one and Death Camp, which he shot at Buchenwald. For my money, that thirty minutes of film is worth all the features Warners will make this year.”

“Including Love Me Again?”

The assistant producer looked around. “Yes, but don’t quote me. Even a lousy job is better than no job at all.”

“It sounds as though Mediate should be directing, not producing.”

“I don’t think directing is a grand enough job for Vince. Why start anywhere on the ladder when you can take the elevator?”

We stood side by side, surveying the room. After a time, Wilner said, “If Vince and company don’t get down here soon, none of these newshounds will be sober enough to put pen to paper.”

I didn’t comment. My attention had been drawn to a woman standing near the bar. She was either a very light brunette or a borderline blond, and she was listening to the animated conversation of a couple of the bar’s best customers. The drunks were sporting tuxedos that made mine look respectable. Their audience was wearing a very striking dress of electric blue. It had padded shoulders, a plunging neckline, and sleeves that covered the tops of her hands. The skirt was full and long enough to hide everything but her very slender ankles. Her almost blond hair was shoulder length and straight, except for a slight curl in her bangs. That was all I could tell at a range of thirty feet, even squinting.

When I looked back to Wilner, he was smiling at me. “I’d lend you my field glasses, but I left them at home.”

“Some pal you are,” I said.

“Would you settle for an introduction?”

“You know her?”

“I work with her. So do you, in a manner of speaking. She’s our publicist on Love Me Again.”

The publicist couldn’t have heard Wilner’s quiet voice, so it must have been clairvoyance that made her glance our way. Or perhaps the Elliott charm was finally coming out of mothballs. Before we could move, she made her excuses to her drinking buddies and started across the room to us. We met her halfway.

“Miss Englehart,” the well-bred Wilner said, “I’d like to present Mr. Scott Elliott. Mr. Elliott, Miss Englehart.”

Miss Englehart had a firm, businesslike handshake that was just a degree or two above room temperature. “How do you do?” she asked.

In close-up, she was still striking, if no longer perfect. Her wide mouth was a little too wide and her pale blue eyes a shade too pale. Her nose took the slightest leftward jog south of the bridge, which, in combination with a merry look in her eyes, gave her an unbusinesslike air, not at all in keeping with her handshake.

“I do fine, thanks,” I said.

Wilner put a hand on my shoulder. “You might as well have a drink and relax while you wait. I’m going to see what’s holding up the parade.” He started to leave and then turned back to me. “No need to observe any vows of silence around Miss Englehart,” he said. “She knows everything.”

When the assistant producer had finally gone away, I asked, “Is that true?”

“Literally,” Miss Englehart said.

“Care for a drink?”

“Yes, but not in here. I’m on duty when I’m around newspaper people. The hotel bar is right across the hall.”

“You do know everything.”

She led me out through an archway shaped like the tip of a minaret and across a quiet hallway. On the other side was a heavy, ornately carved door that might have once graced a castle in Spain. The publicist paused to let me open it for her. As I reached past her to the door’s wrought-iron handle, I said, “Wilner didn’t mention your first name.”

“Freddy was just being gallant. You can call me Pidgin.”

“Excuse me?”

“Pidgin. As in Pidgin English. You know, the kind of English Tarzan uses. The guys who broke me in at the studio dubbed me that as a tribute to the way I wrote back then. I’ve gotten a lot better since.”

“Why hang on to Pidgin then?”

“Because my real name is Eloise.”

“Oh,” I said.

The Stratford bar was built along English lines, with the bartender stationed inside a box of mahogany and brass set against one wall. There were booths along the opposite wall, but Pidgin ignored them, selecting instead a tall stool on an unoccupied side of the bar. She addressed the bartender by his Christian name, which was Art, and ordered a gimlet. I sat beside her and ordered a Gibson, for a change of pace. The change would be watching someone else make it.

“How about you?” Pidgin asked. “Is Scott Elliott your real name or a professional one?”

“Professional,” I said. “My real name is Samuel Spade, but that created exaggerated expectations in clients.”

“Cute. I happen to know you used to be an actor. Freddy told me. So I’ve been wondering if Scott Elliott is some studio’s idea of what would look good on a marquee.”

“It’s my real name,” I said. “But not all of it. It’s my middle and last name, I mean. The studio didn’t like my first name.”

“Eloise?” Pidgin asked.

“Thomas.”

Art brought Pidgin her gimlet and then went on his dinner break.

“Thomas Scott Elliott,” Pidgin said. “T.S. Elliott. Any relation?”

“No. He’s shy a T.”

“Or you have one too many.”

“Two too many, according to Mr. Beaumont.”

“Maybe you should drop a couple then. Tory isn’t wrong very often these days.”

“I’ll think about it.” Someday. At the moment, I had other things on my mind. Pidgin guessed one of them, clairvoyant that she was.

“It was football,” she said. “A touch football game with my brother Bill. He accidentally hit me a shot on the nose with his elbow. It’s been leading me into left turns ever since.”

“Why not have it fixed? After all, you’re in the face work capital of the world.”

“That’s why I haven’t done it. The women around this town are so perfect, so unnaturally perfect, that I’d never make the grade. It’s better to be different. Men like different. I like it for that matter.”

“Do you?” I touched the tip of my nose. “Maybe I’ll see if your brother’s elbow is available.”

“It isn’t. Billy is buried in France.”

“Sorry.”

Art returned with my Gibson, and Pidgin and I drank in silence. Then she said, “Anyway, in your line of work it’s only a matter of time before some thug gives that pan of yours a little character.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with the parts your pal Beaumont plays. I’m just a professional handholder.”

“No heater under that rented tux?”

“Not gat one. And the tux isn’t rented. We’ve both just seen better days.”

“Don’t feel bad. I’m wearing a loaner myself.” She sat up and squared her shoulders so I could admire her dress. I admired it all over again. “I’ve got a pal in the wardrobe department. Janis Paige wore this last year in The Time, the Place, and the Girl.”

“It’s easy to tell which one Janis played,” I said.

“Shame on you.”

I was feeling a little ashamed at that moment, but not over my repartee. I decided that I’d spent enough time playing hookey. “What do you know about Bert Kramer?”

“Only what I read in anonymous notes. I never met him before I was assigned to this picture. He made a pass at me before we’d gotten beyond hello, so I’ve been sidestepping him ever since.”

“Kramer makes passes? He doesn’t seem the type.”

“Take my word for it. You don’t have to be tall, dark, and handsome to figure yourself a ladies’ man. All you need is an ego, and ego is the lifeblood of this town.”

“Kramer thinks jealousy is. The lifeblood of this town, I mean.”

Pidgin shrugged. “Ego. Jealousy. Those two are pretty closely tied, wouldn’t you say?”

I never got a chance to say, one way or the other. The Castilian door to the bar opened, and Fred Wilner stuck his nondescript head in.

“Show time, kids,” he said. “The royal barge approaches.”

 

9

Miss Englehart wasted no time deserting me. She was off her stool and gone before her “See you later, shamus” had completely faded away. That saved me the trouble of coming up with a tag line of my own. Art, the bartender, didn’t seem to be expecting one. At least not from me. He was standing nearby, gazing toward the exit Pidgin had used. I finished my drink and pushed the empty glass across to him.

“I’ll put in a good word for you,” I said.

“Sure you will,” Art replied.

I was a few steps short of the minaret archway when Ardici and the boys stopped playing “Moonlight Becomes You” and struck up “Love Me Again.” The abrupt transition reminded me of a wedding, with the church organist shifting from “Oh Promise Me” to “The Wedding March” when the bride and her entourage finally decide to show up.

I reentered the Egyptian room, still playing with the idea that the wake I’d left there had somehow become a wedding. A wedding reception, anyway. The guests, Pidgin’s journalist charges, were still gathered near the bar, but they’d turned respectfully toward the room’s main door. The wedding party was just now making its entrance, led by the bride and groom.

I guessed the happy couple to be Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Mediate. The dark fullback with the hawksbill profile and the heavy jaw was the only man in the group young enough to be a boy-wonder anything. The woman on his arm was a good three inches taller than her escort and as blond as he was dark. Blonder. Blond enough to drop Pidgin Englehart to brunette second class. Her round face was pale, which made her Chinese-red lipstick show up across the room like a moist, new wound. She was wearing a long dress of what looked like white silk under a shimmering white jacket whose broad diagonal stripes matched her lipstick exactly.

The rest of the party were the money men I’d been hearing so much about. I recognized them from the screening Paddy and I had attended that morning. Each one looked tough enough to call in his own grandmother’s note and liquored up enough at the moment to invest the same dough in imaginary oil wells, which was basically what they were out west to do. Mixed in with them was a sprinkling of studio heavyweights, including Love Me Again’s director, Max Froy. Even in his impeccable tuxedo, Froy looked like a high-priced riding instructor.

Fred Wilner left his position on the flank of the advancing column and joined me. We watched as Pidgin introduced a lady columnist in a silly hat to the Mediates.

“What do you think?” Wilner asked. “So far so good?”

“Where are the actors?” I asked back. “Shouldn’t you have Beaumont and Ella Larsen jumping through hoops or something?”

“Too early for that. In the shooting schedule, I mean. We’re just trying to get the picture’s name in print at this point. If we use our big guns this early, the press will be sick of us by the time we get around to releasing the damn thing.”

“You guys run a pretty elaborate campaign.”

“You’re telling me. MacArthur wasn’t this organized.” He looked at me over the tops of his slipping glasses. Then he asked a question that reminded me of Paddy’s lectures. “This is a whole new side of the movie business for you, isn’t it?”

“Movies never were a business for me, pal.”

Almost an hour passed before Wilner decided the moment was right to introduce me to our host. Mediate had lost his wife sometime during the evening. As Wilner and I walked up, the producer was patting a soused reporter’s shoulder with his left hand and easing him in the direction of the bar with his right.

“Have fun,” Mediate called to the drunk’s retreating back. To Wilner, he said, “That one will never spell the name right. If he even remembers it. Who do we have here?”

“Scott Elliott,” Wilner said. “Of the Hollywood Security Agency.”

“Right,” Mediate said, easing the charm down several notches as he shook my hand. The firm handshake was consistent with the broad shoulders and the lifeguard’s tan. Mediate had intense, slightly protruding eyes under an extremely protruding brow and the dark jawline of a man who has to shave before every meal.

“That boss of yours is quite a character,” Mediate said. “He’s forgotten more about Hollywood than the three of us will ever know. I could listen to his stories for hours.”

Everyone who knew Paddy could, I thought. It wasn’t as though any of us had a choice. Out loud I said, “About this hotel stationery …”

Mediate cut me off. “You came by the set today, I hear. What do you think of our little production?”

“It’s a license to print money.”

Wilner said, a touch too brightly, “You should have had Mr. Elliott with you in the suite.”

Mediate ignored him. “How about the film’s artistic merit?” he asked, showing me some very white teeth. “You’re qualified to judge them, from what I’ve been told.”

“If you have box office, you don’t need artistic merit.”

“I need it,” Mediate said, almost to himself.

I didn’t ask why. It was common enough for people who had achieved commercial success in Hollywood to change their goal to artistic affirmation. Mediate was rushing the process a little, but that seemed to be the way he did things. I shrugged. “I haven’t seen the script. From what I have seen, Kramer has bitten off a good deal.”

Mediate started scanning the small crowd. “Opened Pandora’s box, you mean, by resurrecting characters who were neatly disposed of in the first film? Running the risk of disappointing a lot of diehard fans?”

It was the charge Kramer had thrown at me, restated by Mediate in a breezy way that dismissed its importance. Or maybe he only meant to dismiss the importance of my answer.

I gave him one anyway. “I meant that Kramer has bitten off a lot by taking up Steven Laird’s story again. Steve is a redeemed man at the end of Passage to Lisbon. He’s done the one great thing he’s ever likely to do.”

“So what’s the problem?” Wilner asked.

Mediate answered for me. “The problem is living the rest of your life with the knowledge that you’ve had your best day.” He fixed me with one very intense, though not unfriendly, gaze.

I returned it. “Like I said, a lot to bite off.”

Mediate was still giving me the X ray when someone stepped up next to Wilner. With an effort, I broke eye contact with the producer and turned toward the newcomer. I recognized Mrs. Mediate and then someone else, someone I hadn’t seen in years. That is, I finally realized that I knew Mrs. Mediate. Or had known her, before the war. She’d been a starlet then, one of the troop of starlets Goldwyn always had under contract. Her name then had been Carole Leslie, and we’d been acquainted, socially.

I knew by the way her very red lips parted that she recognized me, too, and I knew it wasn’t the highlight of her evening. Her husband said, “Darling, I’d like you to meet a business associate, Mr. Elliott. Mr. Elliott, my wife, Carole.”

I waited for Carole to tell her husband that we were way past formal introductions, but she let the opportunity slip by. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Elliott,” she said, extending her hand. I managed to brush her red-tipped fingers just before they were withdrawn.

Then Mrs. Mediate addressed her husband. “How about asking me to dance?”

We all turned toward the room’s tiny dance floor. Only two couples had been tempted onto it by the orchestra’s rendition of “Embraceable You.” One of the investors was shouldering around a respectable looking stack of masonry who could only have been his wife. Max Froy had done better for himself. He was dancing with Pidgin Englehart.

“I’m still working the room,” Mediate said. “But Fred here would be happy to do the honors.”

“Charmed,” Wilner said.

“He’s lighter on his feet anyway,” Mediate added.

It was an old straight line, and Carole Mediate came through with the old punch line. “Lighter on mine, you mean.”

We all smiled. Then the lady and her dancing partner left me alone with Svengali junior. I watched her go, wondering if I should have felt offended by her snub and then wondering if I still could feel that way.

Mediate drew me back with a cough. He was holding a conspicuously unlit cigarette and waiting. The cigarette got me out of neutral as far as my delicate feelings were concerned. I had been given the air by an old friend, and now the friend’s husband wanted me to play valet.

“Forget your lighter?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mediate said. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.” I dug out a pack of matches I’d palmed in the Stratford’s bar and tossed them to him. He caught the pack without taking his eyes from mine.

I managed to get a Lucky into my mouth before Mediate had shaken out his match. “Do you mind?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Mediate said, his bemused delivery of the line conveying the same sense as “touché.”

I expected a dismissal after that. Instead, Mediate said, “The dilemma you mentioned with the script, about a man trying to follow up the greatest deed of his life, really isn’t a problem, you know.”

“Because Bert Kramer’s undone Steve’s great moment by making Wojcik a Nazi spy?”

Mediate waved his cigarette. “That’s the way the script deals with it. I meant that it shouldn’t be a problem for any man. The trap is telling yourself you’ve seen your best day, you’ve done your best work. As long as you don’t admit that, as long as you keep looking for new challenges, the dilemma doesn’t exist.”

“I see,” I said.

“The secret, if you’ve shot your bolt in one thing, is to move on to something new. Find something so important that it makes everything you’ve done to date seem like a warm-up.”

“That’s like saying the secret to jumping off tall buildings without getting hurt is being careful never to hit the ground. It’s a small point, but tough to work out.”

A waitress came by with a tray of bubbling champagne glasses. Mediate smiled at her and shook his head. “Tough or not, you have to make the change. Otherwise, you might as well pick yourself a comfortable rocking chair. Look, Elliott, our whole generation just climbed out of uniform. A lot of those ex-soldiers are looking for nothing more from the rest of their lives than a quiet place to sit and listen to baseball games on the radio. With maybe a wife in the kitchen and a Ford in the driveway and a couple of kids playing in the backyard.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

“It’s a cage,” Mediate said. “One that’s going to seem awfully small ten years from now when the memories of the glory days start to fade. I want my best years ahead of me, not in some scrapbook. My best years are ahead of me.”

I didn’t feel up to arguing with Mediate’s positive attitude. He’d found new worlds to conquer and he was conquering them. I hadn’t worked that little trick, which put me at a sizeable disadvantage. I might maneuver him into lighting my cigarette, but he could afford to do it gracefully, knowing, as Wilner had put it, that his elevator was going up while mine was stuck between floors.

I decided to get back to business. “What about the Kramer note being typed on Stratford stationery?”

“What about it?” Mediate asked a little wearily. “Anyone could get that paper. You can walk out of here right now and into the sitting room off the hotel lobby and pick up a ream of it, if you don’t believe me. The idea that anyone connected with the picture wrote that letter is ridiculous.”

“Anyone connected with the picture? Don’t tell me the cast and crew live here, too.”

“Not at these prices. But I maintain an office as well as a residence here. It’s taken them forever to find me something suitable at Warners. A lot of the preproduction work on Love Me Again was done right here. Half the people connected with the picture have been through this place at one time or another. But as far as any of them writing that note …”

“I know,” I said. “It’s ridiculous. I wasn’t thinking of the stationery as a way of narrowing the field of suspects. I agree, it’s useless for that.”

“What is the paper good for, then, if it doesn’t point to the writer?”

“It could point to the writer’s target. His real target.”

Mediate took a long drag on his cigarette. “Me, you mean.”

The idea wasn’t new to him, but it was fairly new to me. I played around with it out loud. “The note wasn’t sent to you or Beaumont, and it easily could have been, as you two are the producers. It was sent over your head to Jack Warner. And it’s written on paper from your hotel.”

“Which tells you what?” Mediate asked patiently.

“That the writer could be trying to imply a connection between your operation and the charge against Kramer.”

The producer almost laughed, but when he spoke he kept his voice low. “Mr. X is hinting that I’m a Communist?”

“Or that you’ve known the truth about Kramer all along and kept it quiet.”

Mediate started to drop his cigarette stub onto the plush carpet but thought better of it. He handed it to a waitress who carried it off like a souvenir.

“I do know the truth about Bert Kramer,” he said, “and the truth is he is not a Communist. The letter was sent to Warner because the idiot who wrote it doesn’t know how a studio works and figures Jack Warner is the man to talk to about a Warner Bros. picture. The fact that it was written on stationery from this hotel is a coincidence and nothing more. Now, go find yourself a drink. I should be seeing to my guests.”

That was his plan anyway. Just as he finished laying it out for me, there was a disturbance at the far end of the room. Mediate and I turned in time to see Bert Kramer make his entrance.

 

10

Kramer was at least dressed for the party he was crashing. His white dinner jacket didn’t look like it would actually button, but a natty black vest had his fat stomach held somewhat in check. His tie was a little askew and his face was flushed, but his line of march as he crossed the room to us was as straight as a new pool cue. He’d evidently bumped into someone at the door, which explained the ruckus we’d heard. The injured party—the dowager duchess I’d seen earlier on the dance floor—was staring after Kramer with a look that was the facial equivalent of a fist being shaken in the air. Kramer’s own expression was cherubic. I didn’t like it.

Neither did Vincent Mediate. “Don’t go too far, Elliott,” he said. “We may be requiring your services.”

Not going too far implied going as a first step, which I now did. Kramer was calling out Mediate’s first name in greeting—yelling it, actually—and his performance was causing the small crowd to rearrange itself. I took cover in a knot of people who had turned toward Mediate in expectation of a scene. Carole Mediate showed her loyalty by rejoining her husband. Fred Wilner was also nearby, but out of the line of fire.

Just before Kramer reached center stage, Pidgin sidled up beside me. She took hold of my right arm and addressed my right ear. “Bring your brass knuckles, Lone Wolf?”

“Vince,” Kramer said for perhaps the tenth time. “It’s good to see you.”

“And you, Bert,” Mediate replied.

I had to admire the producer’s poise. His tone was calm and polite, but his bulgy eyes were giving Kramer the same sunlamp treatment I’d recently enjoyed.

Kramer noticed Carole Mediate. With a single leer, he more than confirmed Pidgin’s assessment of him. “Mrs. Mediate,” Kramer said, “you’re, ah …”

“Looking well?” Mediate suggested.

“I’m the writer, Vince,” Kramer said for the benefit of the entire room. “And I’d say she’s looking a damn sight better than ‘well.’ I’d say she’s looking … incandescent.”

“Oh brother,” Pidgin whispered. The distraction of her breath on my ear almost made me miss the next line.

It was Kramer’s. He was defining the word “incandescent” for Mediate’s benefit. “Luminous, you know. Glowing. Radiant. Hot.”

Mediate opened his mouth to reply, but his wife beat him to it. “You, on the other hand, are looking drunk, Mr. Kramer. You know, tight, soused, pie-eyed.”

Kramer’s laughter spread to the surrounding eavesdroppers, lowering the tension a hair. “The funny thing is,” he said, “I haven’t had a drink yet. Not on the studio, anyway. I only just got here. I was late on account of only getting my invitation an hour ago.”

“The bar is right over there, Bert,” Mediate said. “Let me show you.”

“Don’t bother,” Kramer said. “This will do me fine.” He waved at one of the roving champagne distributors, and she reported on the double.

Kramer helped himself to a glass and told the waitress, “Don’t be a stranger.” To Mediate, he said, “I thought you’d want Bert Kramer here, Vince, seeing as how this movie you’re making is his brain-child. Love Me Again started right here,” he said, pointing to the bony part of his head. Then he moved his fat finger down to the stiff front of his shirt. “Or maybe I should say right here, because it was a labor of love.”

If Mediate was moved by that admission, he kept it to himself. “You’re welcome here, Bert, of course. But you can see this is just a small get-together. We didn’t impose upon Mr. Beaumont or Miss Larsen. Or you. Later though …”

“Later it will be Mr. Beaumont’s picture, Vince. We both know that. A Tory Beaumont movie. Nobody will think of it any other way. They won’t want to interview the guy who produced it or the guy who directed it or even the poor slob who thought it up.

“Nope, Vince. This is my moment to crow. Right now. By the time the thing comes out, nobody will give a damn who wrote it.” He leaned toward Mediate, his fat chin hanging out in the air. “Why, you’d be able to slap any name you wanted to under the screenwriter credit. Nobody would even notice.”

“We wouldn’t do that, Bert,” Mediate said.

Kramer raised his empty wineglass over his head like a distress signal. “I know you won’t. Now.”

The waitress arrived during a lull in the dialogue. Kramer set his empty on her tray, took two full glasses from it, and tossed one back like a shot of bubbling whiskey.

Pidgin tickled my ear again. “Five will get you ten that’s the last one he finishes.”

I didn’t take the bet.

One of the reporters stepped up to Kramer and asked him how he’d come to write the movie. It was the question I’d put to him earlier in the day. The answer Kramer gave now was identical to the one he’d trotted out for me, complete with the preamble describing how sentimental writers were. The only variation was a slight slurring of the words.

Pidgin might have heard the story already herself. She squirmed a little, but didn’t release my arm. “How about a dance?”

I looked over at the Mediates. They hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity to get away from Kramer, which meant I couldn’t either. “Later,” I said.

“Oops,” Pidgin said.

She’d said it in reference to Bert Kramer. He was repeating the word “fulfillment” over and over again without quite getting it right. He was standing with his left profile toward us, and the eye I could see didn’t seem to be focusing on anything in particular. His once flushed face was pale, and he was sprinkling the carpet with wine from his neglected glass.

Pidgin released me. It was the closest thing to a cue I was likely to get. I walked over to Kramer and put my arm around his shoulders.

“Bert, old buddy,” I said. “Where have you been hiding yourself?”

Kramer was still wrestling with his tongue. “Fulment,” he said.

“What do you say we get a breath of fresh air?”

“Fillfent.”

I interpreted that as “yes” and turned him toward the nearest exit, the one Pidgin and I had used earlier. Mediate stepped up at that point, smiling and shaking his head like an indulgent parent whose pride and joy had just broken another window.

“I think an escort home is called for,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Not you,” Mediate said. “Fred will see to it.”

Wilner, who was hovering at Mediate’s elbow, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Of course,” he said.

Kramer was still able to walk, luckily for us. With one of us on each arm, Wilner and I guided him into the hallway. I started to turn him toward the lobby.

Wilner pulled the other way. “The parking lot’s out back,” he said.

The hallway ended at a door marked “Fire Exit Only,” which opened readily when Kramer’s stomach hit the crash bar. Then the night air hit Kramer, turning him into dead weight.

“Be sick,” he said.

We were on a sidewalk behind the hotel. As Wilner had indicated, the hotel’s parking lot stretched out before us. We managed to drag Kramer to the curb at the edge of the walk before he made good on his promise. He made good in spades.

“What were you saying earlier about glamour?” Wilner asked. “Damn. It took a whole bottle of courage to get Bert ready for that scene.”

“Several bottles,” I said.

The screenwriter was kneeling between us, more or less upright. His stiff shirt front was less stiff and his vest was no longer natty.

Wilner pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to me. “See what you can do,” he said. “I’ll get my nice clean car.”

I made a few tentative swipes at Kramer’s shirt before he surprised me by grabbing the handkerchief. “Lemme,” he said.

“Feeling better?” I asked.

“Little.”

I was still wondering why Wilner had drawn the Kramer detail instead of me. My best thought to date was that Mediate didn’t want me questioning Kramer in his current pliable condition. That made it important to try.

“Vince Mediate backed up your story about not being a Commie, Bert,” I said to get us started.

“Better have,” Kramer said.

“And he was pretty patient with you tonight.”

“Better be,” Kramer replied.

“Why is that?”

Kramer was more resilient than the average drunk. His little eyes regained their ability to focus as he looked me over. Then Wilner’s headlights found us, changing the lighting of our scene and its mood. Kramer almost smiled. “We’re pals, Vince and me.”

I tried another approach as he struggled to his feet. “Who called you tonight to tell you about the party?”

“Dunno,” Kramer said. That line didn’t satisfy him, maybe because he came off sounding less than clever. He rewrote it. “A little bird told me.”

Wilner’s Plymouth pulled up at the curb. He opened the passenger door from the inside, and I manhandled Kramer into the front seat.

So far, I’d struck out with my interrogation. I decided I needed another at bat. “Slide out of there,” I said to Wilner, “and go back to the party. I’ll drive Mr. Kramer home.”

The assistant producer shook his head. “Mr. Mediate wouldn’t like us deviating from our orders. He’d give me hell if I showed up inside.”

His smile was almost as slow as his speech. “So would a certain lady publicist, I suspect.”

 

11

The lady publicist was waiting for me when I got back inside. “Did you get Dumbo into his pen?” she asked.

“He’s on his way.”

“How about a drink?”

I shuddered. “I may never drink again.”

“Dance with me, then.”

The orchestra was starting to wilt. They were playing “Good Night Sweetheart” as a broad hint to Mediate’s guests. There weren’t many guests left, Kramer’s sudden deflation having made the rest of the evening an anticlimax. Pidgin and I had the toy dance floor to ourselves.

She was light in my arms, but not—as Florence Hanks might have put it—ethereal. Nor was she distant. She pressed against me as though we’d been dancing together all our lives.

“You’re good,” she said. “A good dancer, I mean.”

“I used to do it for a living,” I said.

“I like you, Thomas Scott Elliott.” As she practically had her head on my shoulder, that wasn’t exactly news. I was beginning to wish I’d taken her up on the drink.

“You remind me of the war,” she added.

“That’s an odd thing to say.”

“I say odd things when I feel comfortable.”

Perhaps inspired by our dancing, Tony Ardici deigned to give us a muted trumpet solo. He still had the same dreamy, liquid way with a horn. The evening took on a soft-focus quality that made the Kramer incident seem like a reel the projectionist had mounted by mistake.

“Why do I remind you of the war?”

“You remind me of the soldiers I met. You’ve got the same ‘How the hell did I get into this?’ look on your face. You’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen, and you hate not being sure. Call it a creeping foreboding.”

“You like that quality in a man?”

“Let’s just say it arouses my sympathies.”

We made the last few turns without speaking. When the number ended, Pidgin gave the musicians a hand. Ardici bowed from the waist. Another Englehart conquest.

“Mr. and Mrs. Big-Shot Producer have flown this coop,” Pidgin said, “which means that we working stiffs are off the clock. How about giving me a lift home?”

“My pleasure,” I said.

I now knew where the parking lot was kept, but I’d surrendered my keys to a car hop when I’d arrived, so we crossed the lobby to the hotel’s main entrance. While the hop was off in search of the LaSalle, Pidgin and I stood admiring Beverly Hills’ expensive peace and quiet. She stood a foot or two away from me on the Stratford’s stone steps, but the distance felt like a mile or two after the intimacy of our dance.

We seemed to have stepped back into our professional roles, so I tried a professional question. “How did you come to read the Kramer note?”

“How did it work its way down to my humble level, you mean?”

She was smiling, but her question still embarrassed me. “I would have expected the studio brass to have kept it as quiet as possible,” I said.

“They probably think they have, the poor saps. The truth is too many people know about it already. It will be a miracle if Kramer gets to hang his name on his labor of love, even with that grandstand play he pulled tonight. To answer your question, I was let in on the secret so I could be ready to issue a statement in the event the great ax falls.”

“What kind of statement?”

“There’s some disagreement on that point. Messrs. Mediate and Beaumont want something that says the studio is standing behind Kramer, the First Amendment, motherhood, and General Motors.

“Jack Warner’s version is an exercise in hand washing. While not acknowledging Kramer’s guilt, the studio will publicly wish he’d never been born.”

“If Warner dumps Kramer, can Love Me Again survive?”

“There’s the rub,” Pidgin said.

The LaSalle ghosted up at that moment, its eight cylinders murmuring like a chorus of English butlers.

“Nice,” Pidgin said. “A souvenir of your former life?”

“All we saved when the Yankees burned the plantation.”

The Stratford’s doorman tucked Pidgin in for me. I tipped him and the car hop and then slid in beside her. Before I could put the car into gear, she leaned over and kissed me. The kiss was long and smooth enough to make Tony Ardici’s work on the horn seem like a jackhammer solo.

“Surprised?” Pidgin asked.

“I didn’t think you were the kind of girl who kissed on the first date.”

“I’ve got news for you, brother. We haven’t even made it to our first date.”

This time I kissed her. When we came up for air, she said, “Don’t tell me, I know. You used to do it for a living.”

The doorman was ready to start selling tickets, so I eased us into the light, well-to-do traffic. “Where do you live?” I asked.

“I have a little place in Burbank, not far from the studio. How about you?”

I told her about the country estate I shared with the ground squirrels.

“I’ve always wanted to see squirrels by moonlight,” she said.

“Doing anything tonight?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

I checked the rearview mirror before wheeling the LaSalle into a sweeping U-turn. The maneuver must have made me dizzy, because I followed it up by asking, “Does the hard-to-get routine always work for you?”

For once, Pidgin didn’t crack wise. “I’d appreciate it if you’d think of yourself as out of the ordinary,” she said. “Then maybe I wouldn’t feel quite so ordinary myself. Or is the word I want ‘common’?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m still a little out of step with civilian life. Do you want me to take you home?”

“Not unless you want to.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“If you’re feeling delinquent, you can pass the time by giving me the third degree. Maybe I sent Jack Warner that note.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like the charming Vincent Mediate. Maybe I resent him coming in from nowhere and landing a seat at the head table. Maybe I don’t like him because my brother was killed in the same fight Mediate got a medal for filming. Maybe I think the medals should have been saved for the guys carrying the guns.”

They were good enough reasons, but I wasn’t buying them. I looked over at Pidgin. She was curled up on the far side of the seat with her head resting against the door. The passing street lights turned her hair from brown to gold with the regular rhythm of a neon sign.

“I don’t think you’re the least bit ordinary,” I said.

“Thanks.”

We drove for a while in silence. When we’d traded the quiet suburbs for a dark stretch of highway, I asked, “Have you read Kramer’s script?”

“Cover to cover. It’s good. Bert’s right about that much.”

“Mind if I ask you a question about it?”

“Not at all. It will keep me from boring you with the story of my life.”

I filed the critique. “Why wasn’t Steve able to return to America? What was the dark secret in his past? It was never explained in Passage to Lisbon.”

“You mean, did he rob a bank or steal an election or just break someone’s heart?” Pidgin asked, expertly reeling off the three guesses Captain Manet had made in the original film. Saying she wasn’t ordinary was underrating her.

“Right,” I said. “Which was it?”

“None of them. Steve couldn’t go back because the mob was after him.”

“Huh?”

“They told you about organized crime during your detective training classes, didn’t they?”

“First day.”

“Well, Steve could never go back to America because he’d crossed those guys. Back in the thirties, he’d been a crusading reporter in New York City. He’d exposed a mob takeover of a local union, and, in the process, he’d fallen for a gangster’s girl. What do you call them in the trade?”

“Gun molls.”

“Right. In retaliation, the gangster killed the girl and put a price on Steve’s head. That’s why he had to leave the country.”

Despite the vivid memory of Bert Kramer teetering on the edge of a gutter, I found myself admiring the guy. “Kramer’s a screwball pitcher who manages to cross the plate every time,” I said.

Pidgin had moved from her neutral corner and was now very close to me. I felt her hair brush across my shoulder as she nodded in agreement. “The way he worked it out explains Steve’s idealism and his death wish both,” she said. “Explains why he ran an antifascist newspaper in Paris before the war, I mean. One high-risk occupation.”

“It also explains why no amount of war service could buy him a reprieve.”

“Exactly. It’s a well-tied package. If our friend Mr. Kramer had voted Republican all his life, his future would be rosy.”

We were finally on the winding tract to the cabin. The air coming in to us from the blackness beyond the headlights was cooler and scented with pine. When I shut the LaSalle down for the night, the sounds of the forest flooded into the void: miscellaneous insects and, after a moment, the hooting of an owl.

“Nice touch,” Pidgin said.

There actually was a moon out, but no ground squirrels. At the sight of my rickety stairs, Pidgin took my arm long enough to remove her high heels. Then she took off down the steps without me, her blue, shimmering dress appearing and disappearing as she moved from moonlight to shadow and back again. I followed her circumspectly, like a man walking into a certain ambush.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs, she was waiting for me, her back pressed against the cabin, her arms stretched out against the wall as though she were holding the place up. It was a self-conscious pose, one inspired by countless, forgotten movies, but that was just one more reason for me to like it. If I needed another reason.

“Sorry for playing the wounded innocent in the car,” Pidgin said, with a shadow of her old smile. “I’m not entitled to. Haven’t been for years.”

“That’s no business of mine,” I said.

“I’m making it your business. During the war I told myself I liked being nice to servicemen. I’ve turned out to be pretty fond of civilians, too.”

“Let this civilian buy you a drink,” I said.

“A Gibson?”

“If you twist my arm.”

On the way to the kitchen, I stopped by the record player long enough to enlist Duke Ellington’s aid. The number I selected was “Clarinet Lament.”

“That’s an old one,” Pidgin said after Barney Bigard’s clarinet had set the mood of the piece. She hadn’t put her heels back on. Without them, she looked almost petite. I had an impulse to lift her onto the kitchen counter, but I mastered it and reached for my cocktail shaker.

“It wasn’t an old one when I bought it,” I said.

“Since we’ve broached the subject, what were you like in the old days?”

“Lighter,” I said. “Generally speaking.”

“Weren’t we all. So, when are you going to tell me how you won the war?”

“That was some other guy.”

“Ah,” Pidgin said.

“Ah what?”

“I have a theory that there are two kinds of veterans: the ones who won’t talk about the war and the ones who won’t stop talking about it. Now I know which kind you are.”

While I measured and poured, Pidgin told me about her family’s farm near Sacramento. In exchange, I passed on a little about growing up in Indiana, how I’d divided my time between watching movies and dreaming of them. I told her about a friend whose father had run a little theater in the late days of the silents, the Rialto, and how the friend and I would sneak in and watch the movies from the wrong side of the screen.

“Not unlike your current situation,” Pidgin said.

I handed her a Gibson. “Very like it.”

“You were going to be the next who back then? Douglas Fairbanks? John Gilbert? Charles Farrell?”

“All of the above.”

She tasted her drink and set it down. “What’s next on the agenda?”

I thought for a moment that she’d picked up where Vincent Mediate had left off, that she wanted to hear my new goal, my plan for the future. Then she wandered into my arms, and I realized that her “What’s next?” referred to the here and now.

“A discreet fade to black, usually,” I said.

“You’re not at the Rialto now, kiddo,” Pidgin said.

 

I dreamt that a phone was ringing for a long time before I realized that it wasn’t a dream. The sun was up, but not up all that far. There was just enough light for me to see the furniture I was tripping over as I ran to the phone in the cabin’s front room. I needn’t have hurried. The party on the other end was going to let the phone ring till doomsday, if that’s what it took.

The determined caller turned out to be Paddy Maguire. “Scotty,” he said, “thank God. I was beginning to think I had two murders on my hands.”

“Who’s been murdered?”

“Bert Kramer, sometime last night. It happened at his place in West Hollywood. Meet me there as soon as you can. Sooner, if possible.”